Bug 259227 – [GTK] Allow automatically pausing the previously playing video with sound when another one starts playing in a newly created tab / window

• Status: NEW
• Component: WebKitGTK

[Jeff Fortin]

The "Enhancer for YouTube" webextension add-on¹ has a "Pause videos playing in background tabs when a video starts playing in the foreground tab" setting that makes a lot of sense: if you already have a playing video+audio tab (ex: a YouTube video), if you start another such tab, it automatically pauses playback in the other tab where sound was playing.

I think that's brilliant both for performance, lower power consumption, and for convenience: after all, it is unlikely that you can watch and listen to two videos at the same time _with sound_ ...

The exception I see is WebRTC: you should obviously not stop a WebRTC video+audio stream in favor of some random video from another tab, in that case it makes sense to have both playing at the same time.

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¹: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-youtube/ and https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/enhancer-for-youtube/ponfpcnoihfmfllpaingbgckeeldkhle

[Suhail]

change from safari to another app which is playing sounds, <audio> status on safari will be paused first and then be playiny, but can't play sounds on safari. This is puzzling.

[Philippe Normand]

(In reply to Suhail from comment #1)
> change from safari to another app which is playing sounds, <audio> status on
> safari will be paused first and then be playiny, but can't play sounds on
> safari. This is puzzling.

This specific bug is not about Safari.

[Philippe Normand]

The problem here is that a different tab means different webview, hence possibly different WebProcess. So this would be a significant effort, and I'm not even sure it would be much GStreamer-related, so I'll update the bug title.