This is how you can enable and use the Tab Mute feature on Chrome OS. The speaker icon also changes to display that the tab has been muted. If you click on the speaker icon on the Youtube tab, the tab will be muted and its audio output will be cut off. For example, here’s how it will look if a Youtube video is playing on the background.
To use this feature, all you have to do is to click on the speaker icon on the tab with audio output. This will restart Chrome, and the tab mute feature will be enabled. Once you click Enable, click on the ‘Restart Now’ button that appears.Under the ‘Tab audio muting UI control’, click the blue ‘Enable’ button.That will take you to the first instance of the word ‘mute’ on the page. This box will turn up on the top right corner of the screen. Press Ctrl + F to open the search box.Go to chrome://flags using your Google Chrome address bar.Google Chrome has a hidden ‘Tab Mute’ feature through which you can do just that. However, what if you want to mute that specific tab without closing it? To stop the audio output, you could just close the specific tab that’s playing audio and reopen it later if you want to. Hence, when you look at all your tabs, you can easily tell which one is playing audio by looking out for the speaker symbol.
#Chrome automute how to
Here’s how to enable the tab mute feature on Chrome.įirst, you should know that Chrome has a tiny speaker icon on the right end of the tab that’s sending audio output. Google is working on a neat trick through which we can know which tab is playing audio, and then mute that specific tab (instead of the whole laptop). If you have multiple tabs open, it can be difficult to know which tab is making all the noise. Memory: 16 GB (8GBx2) G.The internet these days is filled with video advertisements. Motherboard: ASUS ROG Maximus XI Formula Z390
#Chrome automute pro
OS: 64-bit Windows 11 Pro for Workstations System Manufacturer/Model Number: Custom self built People just post things on the internet about enable this flag and it makes everything better, and then when we remove it, they get angry." We've made several moves over the years to try and make "don't touch these" clearer, but they haven't worked. The only reason we have a flags page at all is because that's the only way to toggle the underlying debugging options on Chrome OS. End users are not supposed to enabled them, and can only even access them at all because sometimes we need to get a user to test something in the field. I can say that as the person who argued for shipping this feature by default and lost, I was involved in the discussions with the actual decision-makers, so my claims about why this was not shipped are firsthand"īesides, this feature was never officially implemented in Chrome, it could only be enabled using a flag and we have to keep this in mind: Do keep in mind that r/chrome is highly nonrepresentative of the general userbase.Īs to why this was pulled, the rationale has been posted repeatedly, and it has nothing to do with muting ads, but I can't stop you from choosing to believe whatever you want.
It was the absolute opposite of "widely used". "Clickable tab mute was used by a tiny sliver of the userbase, in part because it was never a shipped feature. The functionality of muting an individual tab still remains accessible to extensions, which can mute tabs on-demand or automatically in response to heuristics the intent is that extension developers provide options here beyond what are built in"
#Chrome automute code
Contributing factors include potential dataloss risk, code complexity, behavioral complexity, and confusing interactions with mute-whole-site capabilities that the general userbase finds more compelling. "The official reason is a combination of a large number of factors, but primarily that this is a symptom band-aid that doesn't address the underlying problems that lead to people wanting to mute tabs, and we should be spending our time addressing those problems. Things have changed as of v71, inexplicably:Peter Kasting explained in Reddit the reasons for this: