The Harrowing Click Sound in the Web Browser -- How to Avoid It?

The Harrowing Click Sound in the Web Browser -- How to Avoid It?

With a great stress on automated and background navigation strategies that are used in the current day web applications using concepts of AJAX, Meta Refresh, I felt one piquant problem that we encounter in our webpages. If you have closely observed in the traditional web applications, every click would trigger an audible alert to be raised by Windows. Now, the automated navigations in the webpages do trigger these alerts.

Particularly when you use AJAX enabled email applications like those at http://www.inbox.com/ and for persons like me, who have an Inbox window open 365x24x7, this means my Windows desktop is producing a non-stop sound on every automated navigation trigger. After a bit of trick, I found a way to get rid of this problem. These sounds are managed and controlled from Windows Control Panel -> Sounds Applet -> Navigation. By default, the click sound is associated with 'Windows Start.wav'. You can set this to (none).Click Apply. Click OK. Your web browser will no longer alert you on any navigation clicks.

There are a few shorcomings to this approach:

1. Since this is a system setting, from within the webpage we can not do anything for our application. We have to give instruction to the user, involving manual intervention or resolution to the problem.
2. As a user if we disable this for one feature, then we might not be knowing what each website actually does and where the navigations actually goes.