Have you all seen the interactive Pac-Man game, made to look like the Google logo in celebration of the 30th birthday of the video game?
Fun, right? Yeah, I tried to play a couple of times this morning - realizing quickly that I should stick to the full-size arcade version. But in the middle of a game, the phone rang and I hit the mute button on my keyboard and went back to work.
A couple of hours later - and numerous browser windows and browser tabs later - I clicked on the link for a news video and had no audio. I hit the volume button, taking the machine out of mute mode, and was surprised to hear what sounded like a siren coming from my machine.
What the heck is that, I wondered? I have a Mac so the idea of some anti-virus pop-up warning going off in the background was unlikely. Plus, the computer wasn’t slowing down or showing any other signs of malfunctioning. So I started to shut down completely - but when I quit Firefox, the siren suddenly stopped.
With the problem solved, I halted the complete shutdown and went back to work, still unsure of what exactly had happened.
Later, I opened a window on Chrome, which is set to open directly to Google, and within seconds, I heard that familiar tune that tells me that Pac-Man is about to start. When the familiar wah-wah-wah-wah-wah sound started shortly after, I recognized the siren sound from earlier. And then it all made sense - kind of.
It’s cool that there’s an interactive game on Google’s logo - a first, I understand - but did Google have to make it auto-start? And where’s the mute button on the game?
I know… boo-hoo for me. Just click away and the game goes away, right? Not exactly. And here’s where it gets weird - at least for me. When I launch Firefox, the browser does just as it should - it opens a window to this blog, which I’ve set as the default home page. But then, within seconds, there was that Pac-Man tune again. There were no other windows open and no other tabs open. And yet, Pac-Man sound is still on.
Here’s what I did determine: Pac-Man auto-started on Chrome, Safari, IE and Firefox on both systems. But the glitch, with the noise running in the background only, is only happening on Firefox on the Mac.
Am I losing my mind? Has anyone else experienced the same glitch? It’s enough to drive this blogger insane.
updated, 5:11 pm PDT: Apparently, I was not losing my mind - and I was not alone. Better yet, there have been some changes. There is now a mute icon at the lower left part of the screen and, by default, it’s in mute mode for the auto start. If you click insert coin to manually start the game, the audio is automatically on. As for the weird glitch in my version of Firefox for the Mac, it turns out the CoolPreviews add-on for Firefox is the culprit. Disabling it takes care of the problem. And I only have that installed on my Mac, not on my Windows machine.
