I am looking for a firefox extension that will allow me to toggle microphone access, preferrably per tab, for example disabling it while I’m not speaking in a zoom meeting to reduce tracking.
Edit: clarification due to misunderstanding: i want something that lets me toggle actually giving a site mic input without removing permissions
Isn’t this default Firefox behaviour?
Whenever a site wants access to the microphone I get a prompt from Firefox asking for its permission to grant it to the site/tab. Then when I close the tab, the permission goes away.
There is an option to remember my preference in the popup but there’s no chance in hell I check it.
I guess the person is asking for a mute switch. Once the microphone access is granted, the person can’t mute/unmute unless the website provides such an option.
Isn’t there usually a yellow pop-up on the top of the screen showing microphone and webcam controls if they are active? I think that’s how you control it. Now this isn’t per-tab control, but it’s better than no control at all I guess
I mean something that lets me toggle actual mic input to sites once they have access, because if you turn it off you need to refresh to turn it back on.
On many earbuds, you can electrically short the microphone by holding the button. However, the OS will likely detect that and might react by ending the call or something, and if you plug in your headphones in that state, the mic will not be detected.
Why don’t you just mute your mic in the OS? On Linux, it’s easy to do that with pulsemixer
I guess the use-case is having the mic available to multiple tabs but only actively talking to one.
yes kinda but also only actually giving input when i want to
Is there any reason you can’t just mute your mic entirely and need to specifically mute it for one tab?
This is Windows-based and mutes your microphone globally, but if you’re concerned about leaking video/audio accidentally I’ve found it very helpful:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/video-conference-mute
This is part of PowerToys. It says “legacy mode” because they were gonna deprecate it now that they’re trying to build the functionality into W11, but relented and are keeping it based on the outcry from W10 users.
You can do this on Linux pretty easily, just rig a keyboard shortcut via whatever mechanism your desktop environment provides to run something like pactl mute @DEFAULT_SOURCE
Can’t really do it at the browser level. In Linux you can run a command that mutes/unmutes the mic, assign that command to a keyboard shortcut. It can be more granular too like by input source/application but it could take more tinkering.
Easiest solution tbh would be to use a headset with a mute button.
Why not just… get a headset with a mute button? Laptop and phone mics sound like shit to those of us with good audio. There are great inexpensive headphones with awesome mics that will make you sound as if you’re standing right next to them. And they have a physical mute button, to boot. It’s far less obvious (and cheaper) if you get a wired pair or a boom mic, because you just click the physical mute button hanging on a little control pad off the wire below, instead of tapping your ear every time.
Probably not anything at a browser level. It sounds like you want to split your mic into multiple input channels and then selectively activate those channels. There may be audio software for that, but it’s way outside my knowledge.
It doesn’t help on a laptop, tablet, or phone, but on a desktop just unplug your mic.
