Google’s Chrome browser might soon be getting an easy way to tell you which open tabs are making noise, or recording it. The new feature is part of the latest Chromium build, and features a throbbing EQ animation over the noisy tab’s favicon (video below) to tell you and your system that it’s doing audio stuff. Chromium is the open source project that feeds into Google’s Chrome browser, and is often the first place that its new features show up.

The addition was spotted by François Beaufort, who notes it was designed to help safeguard active tabs from being trashed when system memory runs out. The feature doesn't work on the latest OS X build of Chromium, but we tried it out for ourselves on the Windows version, and while it works with standard audio files and HTML5 video, it won't respond to video in Adobe's Flash Player. It might be a while before we see this added to the mainstream version of Chrome, but what a glorious day it will be when hunting down the source of that mystery sound is as easy as looking for the tab with the moving icon.