AudioZapper - What You See Is What You Hear for Google Chrome

Web Browsers - How to Keep Audio on the Background

Imagine that your audio is a map and your web browser is a city. Now, imagine that you can listen to any audio in the city, and that you can switch between different maps of audio. Now, imagine that you can play one map at any time — but you don’t want to waste time switching between maps, so you have to zap them before they get to play.

If you’re listening to a YouTube video, for instance, you might think you’re listening to the video in the background, but you’re actually listening to the YouTube audio. So when you’re zapping, you’re muting the previous map before switching to the next. But if you change the YouTube video’s quality, you will also get zapped, and will have to restart the video.

On the other hand, if you just don’t switch — if you’re listening to one feed, you’re in the background, so nothing plays. That’s why, to have one sacred audio channel, you should have a fixed feed in the background, and if you switch to a different audio, you should switch to the previous one before switching. This would be the most natural behavior.

But why do browsers do it like this?

First, to keep the audio on the background, you have to have a tab with a play button. Now imagine that you have two tabs open — one playing a video, and one playing audio. If you have a tab with the play button, and you switch to a tab that doesn’t have the play button — that means that the audio will go away.