[xp84]

I've almost never seen these tiny icons to have any actual useful information being conveyed (meaning they are tracking amplitude or pitch). They're usually purely decorative, or boolean in function, meaning you can see they're flat if you are completely silent or they're bouncing around if not silent.

You can have 2 GIFs for "silent" and "sound happening" if one cares to truly indicate if it's picking up sound / playing sound, and switch between them. Will be 1000x simpler and 99% fewer lines of code to maintain forever.

[DamonHD]

And won't annoy people who get over-stimulated.

I don't normally have that issue, but one site had (has?) a bright green thing that jumped periodically that was so vastly distracting that I could not read the text on the page without covering the 'thing' somehow, eg with my hand! Absolutely pointless. I had to give up using the site entirely, even though it was otherwise useful.

[mrob]

If you use uBlock Origin on Firefox, it's very easy to remove that kind of annoyance using the "element zapper" mode. See:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Element-zapper