The new tab mute button

[awrfsafwq3e41q2]

Firefox just updated with a new design for the tab mute button. When a tab is playing audio it now shows a large button next to the site icon.

It has a side effect that - if you have many tabs open, that button physically resizes the tab to be wider in order to show the tab's name. When the tab's audio stops, the button hides itself and also makes the tab shrink physically.

I really dislike this new design. When the tab resizes it moves all the other tabs (with a distractingly slow animation), offsetting all the tabs buttons to the left/right whenever audio starts/stops playing. The fact that the button stays visible for several seconds after audio completely stops makes this worse - you now have no idea when the tab buttons will slide back to the left again; if you click on a tab the moment the button disappears, the tab buttons slide leftwards at the same time and make you click on something else (likely the tab close button). Adding animation to this makes it even worse. Now your tab bar is unnecessarily animated whenever a tab stops playing audio, randomly shifting left and right at random intervals (it's around 4 seconds after audio stops, but do you really expect people to keep track how many seconds has passed since a tab has stopped playing audio?) and you can never be sure if you could click on the wrong place due to the tabs shifting around all the time. This just screams amateur UI design.

I would like to request to revert to the old design - at least the tab sizes won't keep changing unexpectedly and distract the user.

[Agentvirtuel]

Hello

Take a look at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1497614 and if you wish to test userChrome.css /* prevent audio playing tabs from modifying tab width */

[siffemcon]

You should also post that at https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/idb-p/ideas.

It can be fixed with CSS - see https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/1j60bjk/move_mute_icon_back_over_the_favicon

[Mattityahu13]

yeah and on top of that the mute audio is to big so i find myself accidently clicking it often....didn't notice the tab size issue until now.  yeah hope this gets fixed, because they are doing such a great job keeping this browser active, and adding nice new features.. it's been my default browser since first release.

[superguru]

And on top of that, this is now a Play icon for YouTube tabs.

Clicking on it starts the video, but does not switch to that tab.

Clicking on it again mutes the video, but does not pause it, so now the whole video plays, probably without me even knowing, in a background tab that I'm not even viewing.

[kagato1980]

Please add option to remove the audio icon..I've got 15 tabs open, and 50% of the time I'm clicking the mute button instead of the tab when I'm switching between tabs

[siffemcon]

You should also post that at https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/idb-p/ideas.

You can hide it with CSS.

Put this code into your userChrome.css file:

.tab-audio-button {display:none !important;}

If you're not familiar with using CSS, see https://userchrome.org/.

[Agentvirtuel]

Hello

In this case, it's best to open a new topic, because the subject browser.tabs.tabMinWidth, is resolved with Firefox 137 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/stop-changing-the-size-of-the-tab-when-audio-plays/m-p/92...
By way of illustration https://www.youtube.com/embed/d2X97YtyJ5Y

[kagato1980]

Why am I as an user expected to install weird **bleep** and mess around with CSS? What? Just give me an option in the settings to disable it.

[TI99Kitty]

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@kagato1980 wrote:

Why am I as an user expected to install weird **bleep** and mess around with CSS? What? Just give me an option in the settings to disable it.

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The stupid thing is, there IS an option for that in about:config. Setting browser.tabs.showAudioPlayingIcon to false is supposed to get rid of the mute button. Some recent update broke it, and it no longer works. I've got the stupid button back, and it takes up most of the tab.

Mozilla needs to stop forcing these unwanted changes on us. If I turn off something in the settings, they should not be going "You don't like that? Too bad, you have to heave it anyway."

[Agentvirtuel]

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/move-the-mute-tab-button-next-to-the-close-button-like-ch...

@Tum wrote:

At the very least give us a simple option to disable the mute button.

[jlpxsc]

I don't understand what was wrong with right clicking to mute.  That's the only way I've muted any browser tab on all apps I've tried.   But with ublock I rarely have to mute a tab, however I do switch between tabs a lot, and I have just been muting them and wondering why my tab hadn't changed and where my audio went.  Like how did this pass the idea phase, let alone design and implementation?  Maybe I use it differently, but if I want to mute I'm right clicking.  If I want to select a tab I should be able to select it by clicking ANYWHERE ON THE TAB not look for  a tiny audio playing button and click somewhere else.  Just give me my tab man, I want to click the tab to bring it to the front.  I don't need a ton of options for a simple web browser, but I also don't need bad UI design to drive me insane until I finally realize that sometimes there's an audio icon there, and sometimes not, and clicking where I've always clicked to activate a tab, since tabbed browsing has existed, shouldn't be changed to sometimes have a mute button and other times now.  How about no mute button, or user choice setting to turn it off.

[mmortal03]

I don't precisely remember the old way in which this was handled, but why can't the mute button just make use of some of the tab width that is already there, rather than widen the tab when it's playing? Doing it this way would both deal with the very annoying tab resizing that shifts the whole tab row, catching your eye and making you think you might have accidentally closed a tab, but it would also allow for the mute button to remain present. I also agree that people should be able to completely disable the mute button if they don't want it at all, but for me, at least, the tab resizing/shifting that it causes is the most problematic part.

Edit: Does the tab shifting only occur when browser.tabs.tabMinWidth is set to a value smaller or larger than 100? Maybe a workaround is to just set it to 100 for the time being?