Every time I spent some time checking my social networks, Instagram ended up making me a bit uncomfortable for a very silly reason that I eventually realized affected more people than I imagined: the volume control on Reels.
I talked to some friends and they all complained about the same issue, usually with memes, some much louder than others or even with blown-out and edited audio. So I thought: is it possible to control this automatically? The answer was obviously yes, it was possible, but another question came to mind and took center stage.
Why doesn’t Instagram have audio control on the web?
I asked myself this question, and honestly, I didn’t find any obvious answer. YouTube has volume control on Shorts. Is it difficult to implement? No. Is there some legacy issue that’s there and for some reason prevents this? I don’t think so either (and Instagram on the web is relatively new). The most obvious answer is that it’s not a priority, or the Instagram team hasn’t implemented it simply because they don’t want to. Or maybe they’ll take their time, considering that Stories took a long time to arrive on the web version, and posting a story was impossible for a long time…
My extension
It does just one thing: it adds an audio control for each video media found on domains within the *.instagram.com range. Simple.
The publishing process was quite interesting because the last time I published an extension on the Chrome Web Store it was manifest v2 and now v3 is the standard, some things have changed, but everything went well and it can already be downloaded here: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/instagram-reels-audio-con/ccpedidblbelhkafckckeilifnaieicn
The source code, as always, is on my GitHub, take a look there to see how it turned out (and maybe improve it?).