Yes, this is what I do. It would be nice to use the volume rocker to do that.

How do you expect it to know which volume setting you want to adjust?

It just needs to be smarter about the context. If a video is loading in chrome, 90% of the time the intent is to turn down the volume of the video, it's broken that it waits for it to start playing.

Honestly, the most intuitive option for me would the audio controls should never touch the ringer, bury that behind a menu, rather than switching based on context.

I haven't used Android in a while but that used to be a setting... "Volume controls:" with a selector for what it did... Volume, ringer or both

How about having them not ever adjusting the ringer?

You can always adjust the ringer (something people rarely do -- for quite times there's the "silent" mode anyway) from the UI, and always use the volume buttons for the system's (music, video etc) audio volume.

There's just two buttons. Both have specific purposes.

You can touch the screen to drop the selector, click on which volume you want, and go ahead with using the rocker for that volume selector.

To silence app-audio, I use just: volume-rocker, click on down arrow, click on music icon to mute. That's it.