It's time to give Firefox an audio mixer.

The title says it all, it is time to give Firefox an audio mixer.

The web is becoming increasingly more multimedia. While the bulk of web content is still text, and will likely remain text for a long time to come; multimedia is here to stay. The curent state of multimedia on the web is painful, particularly on sites such as MySpace where opening a single page could result in several movies or MP3s playing at once... not to mention the chaos that can happen with for those of us that are addicted to browser tabs.

All audio played from a plugin should be passed to the browser's audio mixer. The browser should have a variety of mixing controls including:

• global mute and volume
• per-tab mute and volume
• automatic volume adjustments based on focused tab status
• volume and mute controls per embedded object
• automatic volume adjustments for embedded objects in view status

Plugins should be given an api to the mixer. There is likely a way to mask older plugins to some kind of virtual device. If so, Firefox could add this functionality without making updates to any plugins.

Such an API could also be accessable via javascript, giving AJAX the power to have sound events or stream audio. Then things will get really fun.