Media control button

[s1fly]

An idea for better media control in Firefox.

At the moment, if you need to quickly turn off audio playing on a tab, you need to find it and then right-click to mute the tab. There are no further controls available.

In Chrome, when you play a video or audio, a button appears on the toolbar.

Clicking this button shows a small panel of media control buttons allowing you to pause or skip tracks and even features some artwork. It would be amazing to implement some version of this in the Firefox toolbar.

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[pootmonkey]

I've voted for this idea.

That said, I'm not too concerned about artwork, although a small preview of the relevant page, just so you know which page or what media you're controlling would be useful.  For lighter-weight implementation, perhaps the tab's webpage title would suffice.  (And that might be a toggle-worthy option, allowing the user to decide which they prefer.

Also, implementation should account for the fact that a person might, intentionally or not, have media playing or paused on multiple tabs -- and allow selection of the relevant one for the controls to be applied to at a given moment.  Even with multiple choices here, it might still be fewer tabs than the user has open in total, and so be useful as a filter.

(I'm unchecking the 'Email me when someone replies' button for this idea, voting for it but not following its progress.  I don't think I have much more to add to it.)

[Nich]

I agree with both hands!

[KERR]

(here's S1fly's original pic embedded to save a click):

Good idea, it saves hunting through all your tabs to see which is making noise. Which is a valid issue for people with heaps of tabs open.

On Windows you get the media control overlay thingy but it's hit and miss/takes up a heap of space. Sometimes it just says "Firefox is playing media". It's way too flakey.

A global audio/video control on the toolbar sounds cool.

[Anonymous]

I would like a function to not play media on multiple tabs at the same time.

[Leonardo0420]

Exelente

[jscher2000]

For now, you might find the following add-on useful. It adds a toolbar button listing the tabs playing audio. You can use the list to switch tabs or mute them immediately.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/sound-control/

That much less fancy than Chrome's feature, but at least that much should be simple to implement.

[s1fly]

Thanks everyone for your comments!

@Anonymousthat's a good point, perhaps the button could stay on the toolbar and either warn when another tab starts playing media, or simply block it.

@jscher2000I checked that add-on out, it looks useful but it is nearly 6 years old! Let's hope this feature request might be considered by the developers in the future.

[Anonymous]

Music will often be played in the background, so there is a large demand for controlling media on inactive tabs.

[Jon]

Hey all,

Here with an exciting update…

Your idea has quickly received a great deal of votes and support here in the Mozilla Connect community, so we are upgrading the status to “Trending idea.” This means it’s now one step closer to reaching our internal teams for review—learn more about The Idea Journey.

Please keep the conversation going (the more details, the better) and stay tuned for updates 😃

-The Community Team

[kanishk]

Desperately need a native media control button!

[aachukay]

Sounds like an incredibly useful feature!

[s1fly]

Nice work @Anonymous , I'll give it a go, thanks for sharing!

[bun]

Please add this feature

[thisisthepope]

Yes, please!