Comment 15 for bug 77010

I agree with Roger that this is currently one of the most irritating minor issues with Ubuntu and Gnome. It bothered me some much hearing the system beep when using Firefox's find feature that I spent a fair amount of time looking for solutions to this. In the end, the only solution I was able to make work was disabling the system beep entirely, and using Compiz's visual system bell feature.

Like many people have written, really the correct solution is to play the Gnome alert sound instead of triggering the system beep. This would bring Ubuntu more in line with what Mac OS X does in similar situations, allowing the user to choose the alert sound to play through the speakers in the Sound preference pane. In this day and age, there is really no excuse to trigger the system beep during a normal graphical Gnome session.