One-click audio muting for any Chrome tab may soon come back from the dead

Today, you can already mute any Chrome tab’s audio by right-clicking it and selecting “Mute site” as depicted in the image below. It’s a feature that Google added a while back to help alleviate those annoying audio ads that abruptly blast through your computer speakers without your permission (How rude!), and is quite honestly one of the best inventions since the squeegee.

You may notice that this method takes two clicks to complete the muting process (Once to right-click the tab and once to select the option), but Google used to have an even easier way to handle this. As discovered and tracked by Redditor Leopeva64-2, the original method in which you simply click the speaker icon on the right side of a tab to mute the sound is returning.

Tab audio muting UI control

When enabled, the audio indicators in the tab strip double as tab audio mute controls. – Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, Fuchsia

#enable-tab-audio-muting

First appearing as a developer flag on the Chrome Canary build, this is not guaranteed to make its way to Chrome Stable. According to the commit where this was located, Google is looking at how this method of toggling sound stacks up against the global media controls that are already baked into the browser, and after a stint, it’s going to decide whether or not to keep this feature around.

In my opinion, the global media controls section is fantastic, but it’s still more work to mute a tab than clicking once on the source. Imagine you have multiple tabs playing audio (if you’re crazy like me, that is) – I don’t see the primary control center for audio being as effective with managing all of that as the tab audio muting UI control discussed here.

Our plan is to run an experiment to compare the usage of tab muting with the usage of the global media control to help determine whether users would actually use this feature and if so, if we should put the control in the tab strip or in the global media control.

Chromium Gerrit

Based on this comment from the developer, the company is looking at enabling the feature across just 1% of standard Chrome installs for testing and will roll it out further if people like it. I’m not entirely certain how it will quantify user feedback on a non-test build of Chrome, but that’s the current plan. Let me know in the comments if you find this feature attractive or if you’d rather just control everything from the aforementioned global media control center.