Remove "Mute This Tab" tab context menu item when tab isn't playing audio

adamaveray

Brief Summary
'Mute This Tab' in the context menu should only be shown for tabs that are currently playing audio.

Details:
The tab context menu is getting very long, and it's less common that a tab is playing audio than not, so showing "Mute This Tab" for every single tab is additional clutter that could be removed unless relevant, much like how the "Mute Other Tab(s)" item(s) only show when other tabs are playing audio.

Image/Video:
The rather large context menu including the 'Mute This Tab' item despite no audio playing:

laiz

The option was added as some sites very briefly play audio that someone might want to mute: https://orionfeedback.org/d/4016

That being said, giving users the ability to fully customize the context menu of their browser would be a great feature, but I don't know how feasible that is.

adamaveray

laiz In that case would it be possible to only display "Mute Tab" after a tab has played any audio (even if the audio has since stopped)?

Longely

adamaveray

you still might want to mute the tab before it plays anything. if you have a site with audio notifications, and you know you want it muted from start as you are doing something else, then its pretty annoying you have to wait for the sound before you can mute it

adamaveray

Longely Fair enough, I know https://orionfeedback.org/d/5530-show-tab-tree-commands-when-presssing-alt is another context menu related request so other people are also feeling the context menu is getting overwhelming, but if this use case is important enough then it should stay!

To me though preemptively muting seems fairly niche and if it’s a site that you know is annoying and want to mute all audio from it would make more sense to add an “Enable Audio” site-level setting to control that rather than the context menu (otherwise the same justification could be used for the other site-level toggles to be in the context menu).

eirk

i think it could work with autoplay setting?

Vlad

This highlights a problem/dillema we are facing.

As noted above the feature was added as a result of a direct user feature request which made sense at the time.

This is a request to reverse this and is always an unfortunate thing, as we do not have resources to spare, especially undoing things we already invested product management, development and testing time into.

Not sure what to do about this not what stance to take.

adamaveray

Vlad This might help: while testing for another issue I've noticed Safari's implementation is how I suggested here – the 'Mute Tab' context menu item only appears after the tab has played audio even if it's now stopped, but 'Mute This Tab' is always available even before playing anything in the menu bar under Window, giving the ability to preemptively mute a tab without needing an ever-present context menu entry.

Before playback:

During playback:

After playback (speaker icon is removed, but menu item remains):

Vlad

adamaveray Good middle ground, thanks for taking time to think through it.

Longely

yeah, perhaps being able to mute it from Window menu is good enough. even tho that isn't actually working right now. I presume its a bug.