Google Chrome recently updated their browser to introduce the little speaker icon telling you which tab is playing either video or audio. In my opinion, this is a feature that has been missing from web browsers ever the beginning. Too often I open up a string of tabs and find audio coming from one of them unaware of the annoying auto-play functionality. Yes Facebook I'm talking to you as well. Ever wondered though how Chrome knows that music is playing in the browser?
Multimedia hacker Mike Melanson explains that there are two ways media is presented online: Publishers use third party plugins like Flash or they use HTML5 to play audio and video within the browser. By using HTML, Chrome can identify which browser is playing the music through HTML5. Unfortunately Flash can be a bit more difficult as it uses a plugin API to detect audio.
Read his full post here.
