My biggest gripe with the internet...

If there is one surefire way to have your website annoy the crap out of me and cause me to never return to it again, it's to have any type of audio playing automatically when the page loads. I hate this more than anything else on the internet.

When I am web browsing, I generally am also listening to music. When I am at work, this music is played through my computer, but is kept at a low volume so as not to disturb my coworkers. Because of this, it's not really practical for me to mute the entire computer, but this isn't too much of a problem...that is until I click a link to some stupid website and all of a sudden ads start talking to me or music starts playing. And it's never at a low volume or even the same volume as my music, it's always much louder than my music and catches everyone's attention.

At home, I usually keep my computer muted so that I don't have to be annoyed by this and I just listen to music on another computer at my desk or on my stereo. This is great until I go to YouTube or want to play a file that's on on my computer. Then I have to unmute the computer, do what I want to do, and then remember to mute the computer again or face the consequences.

The biggest offender of this is MySpace. I rarely even go on MySpace, but the few times I do, every page I go to has some stupid song that I'm sure to hate automatically playing when it loads.

Can't I just browse in peace? Is that so much to ask?

Now, I know that the entire internet isn't going to change and this is probably just going to get even worse so what to do about this? Someone, and I would do it myself, but I'm never going to have the time to sit down with this, needs to create a Firefox extension that allows the user to mute individual tabs. I would like to have it automatically mute all tabs except for those that I manually unmute or put on a safe list. This way, I can browse in peace and listen to music, but when I want to actually hear something from a site, I can unmute it and hear it.