Stop the music in my browser!

July 31, 2005 8:24 AM

Is there any way to set IE or Firefox (under XP) so that it NEVER plays sound?

I have never - and I don't mean hardy ever, I mean not once, ever - wanted to hear the crappy music or sound effects the subgenius designer embedded in their site. Can IE be set to never play sounds? Or if Firefox can, this might finally tip me over to switching.

posted by mojohand to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

There's a "Background Music Conductor" extension for Firefox which blocks background .midi files. But I second your question - I'd love to have the ability to turn off ALL sound, including Flash plug ins and other embedded files, from my browser.
posted by Gortuk at 8:27 AM on July 31, 2005

Best answer: Try this for IE: tools/advanced - uncheck "play sounds in web pages".
posted by iconomy at 8:37 AM on July 31, 2005

Best answer: Ooops - that should be

Click Tools on the browser bar, and then pick Internet Options, and then pick Advanced.
posted by iconomy at 8:38 AM on July 31, 2005

Someone should write a plugin for Firefox that would enable a on/off action for sound by clicking in the status bar somewhere. I don't want my browser to NEVER play sounds, but most of the time I find it annoying when there is sound when I don't expect it.

As for my idea/solution. My friend once told me that the software that came with his sound card drivers actually let him mute individual applications. So that means there must be software that can do this too available somewhere. I've done a quick search for this on google, but I have not found anything, if I had, I would be using this software myself. So for IE do what iconomy said. For Firefox...just wait ;-)
posted by Sonic_Molson at 9:10 AM on July 31, 2005

It's kind of an out-of-the-box solution, but one could probably use AdBlock to block *.mp3, *.wav, *.mid, etc.
posted by box at 9:29 AM on July 31, 2005

Of course, you'd still have Flash noises. And you wouldn't be able to download sound files. What a terrible idea.
posted by box at 9:32 AM on July 31, 2005

That's what I did, box. Works great.
posted by iconomy at 9:33 AM on July 31, 2005

If you have the quicktime plugin installed, go to its control panel and see if its set to handle the mp3 mimetype. I disabled quicktime from being active for mp3 and midi and the like, and other than flash I don't think I ever hear music on web pages. Instead I get the Firefox thing telling me I'm missing a plugin (and thankfully so.)

I don't think this will apply to IE since it seems to like to play sounds on its own without a plugin, but you can try disabling that in preferences.
posted by Rhomboid at 9:46 AM on July 31, 2005

Two steps:

1. Use box's tip to remove all audio elements

2. Install the FlashMute utility to turn off sound in Flash elements.
posted by rxrfrx at 10:41 AM on July 31, 2005

ive had luck with this plugin stopping embeded quicktime/windows media player video and audio:
MediaPlayerConnectivity
posted by yeahyeahyeahwhoo at 6:32 AM on August 1, 2005