Tab Ducker
Automatically lowers background audio when newer tab audio starts, with optional automatic marking and manual overrides.
How to use it
- Open the Tab Ducker toolbar popup.
- Turn on Automatic duck marking for hands-off use. When two unarmed tabs produce sound, the older audio session is temporarily marked as background and ducked.
- Use a tab switch anytime you want to keep that tab manually armed.
- Set the ducked volume; the default is 15%.
- Optionally adjust the sound threshold to ignore very quiet audio; the default is 0%.
What the indicators mean
A ducked tab temporarily uses the Tab Ducker icon as its favicon, making the active ducking state easy to spot in the tab bar.
Audio detection
Tab Ducker uses Opera/Chromium tab-audio state and, where the page permits it, local waveform sampling of normal audio and video elements. The sound threshold helps avoid ducking for silent or effectively silent playback. Some protected cross-origin media or Web Audio content cannot expose a precise waveform to a content script; in those cases the extension falls back to the browser's audible state.
Troubleshooting
- If an already-open tab is not detected after installing or updating, refresh that tab once.
- Browser-internal pages such as
opera://pages cannot be controlled by normal web content scripts. - If a site behaves differently from ordinary HTML audio/video, Tab Ducker may rely on Opera's audible-state fallback.
Privacy
All detection and ducking happens locally in your browser. Tab Ducker does not send browsing data, audio, settings, or analytics to an external server.