Amongst the spammers in my daily referrer report I still see a lot of wanna-be thugs at MySpace hotlinking my pictures.  You’d think they’d learn by now, since all they end up with is a picture of Boots instead of the expected guns. 

Anyhow, just out of curiosity I sometimes follow the link back to their profiles.  I’m almost inevitably assaulted by their piss-poor musical selections.  I’ve learned to do a quick scroll to try to catch the player before it has a chance to stream the song (or video, in some cases).  But sometimes I’m too late, or they’re in the comments area and really hard to find.

I need a Firefox plugin to silence MySpace (perhaps it could be called “QuietSpace”?).  Actually, what I really need is a plugin to silence the web in general.  Or perhaps have one that asks my permission before a sound is emitted (kind of like Firefox’s pop-up blocker:  “This site has attempted to play a sound.  Do you wish to allow it?”).  Of course, most of this crap is done with Flash, which makes it technically challenging.  I’d ask for a setting in Flash for this, but we end-users are not the ones who drive the requirements for the Flash player.  If we were, we could stop those annoying Flash animations without resorting to blocking Flash altogether.  That function used to be there in older versions of the player (Right-click and uncheck “Play” or hit “Stop”, depending on the version).  I’m sure the advertisers hated it, though, so it’s no longer there.

As for MySpace?  I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a large collection of badly designed, badly implemented, obnoxious, content-free web pages outside of a spam link farm (which at least didn’t play music without my permission).

Update:  Google and ye shall receive!  A little searching turned up a handy utility called FlashMute.  It allows you to use a hot-key (Ctrl-Alt-M) to enable/disable muting of Flash.  It didn’t work quite right for me, though, as it didn’t seem to stop Flash.  However, it has a “mute entire browser” setting that did the trick.  I suspect there’s something about Flash 9 (9.0 r 16) that breaks FlashMute, since that version of the player just came out a few weeks ago (and I wouldn’t put it past the Flash developers to try to work around it).

It won’t give me warning that sound is coming, but at least I can easily toggle sound in the browser (and just the browser) now by hitting Ctrl-Alt-M.