Google makes muting Chrome tabs easier

Stop us if you've heard this one: You're surfing the Web, opening tabs left and right, when out of nowhere, you get blasted with sound from an autoplay ad or video.

In most browsers, you're stuck: You're going to have to click through all your tabs to find the offending media. Not so in Google Chrome. An update to the browser, released last year, puts a tiny little audio icon to the right of noisy tabs.

Once you locate that tab, though, you still have to scroll through and find the video or source of noise. Until now. On the latest iteration of the Chrome browser, Google has added a simple option for muting tabs completely. Just right-click and select the "Mute tab" option, and anything playing within the tab will stay silent until you unmute it. A little speaker icon with a line through it will indicate which tabs you currently have muted.

According to reports, Mozilla is also experimenting with a similar functionality for Firefox. In the Firefox 42 beta, a little icon will appear on a tab if it's producing any kind of sound. Click on it, and you'll mute the tab (or unmute it)—a slightly easier implementation than Chrome's solution.

As Mashable pointed out, Google was initially hesitant to make this move. "After much debate, we decided not to proceed with a tab mute control, as this crosses a very important line: If we provide Chrome controls for content, we're implying that Chrome should take on a responsibility to police content," Chromium's Francois Beaufort posted on Google+ last year.

"For 'behaving' content, we think it's reasonable for a user to click on a tab and use the content's media controls to stop playback. In this case, a Chrome tab mute control would be redundant. This redundancy is bad since it can confuse users (e.g., to play a video and forget that a tab was muted days ago); and, based on experience, confused users often report unexpected behaviour as browser bugs, which would be a big distraction to the Support and Eng staff," he later added.