How to Mute Tabs in Google Chrome

Hi, my name is Philipp and I’m a tab-a-holic. I love to open a billion tabs and then just go trough them one by one. While The Great Suspender solved many of my RAM and performance problems, there’s one thing that annoys me from time to time: random websites playing sound. While Chrome already helps me spotting the perpetrator by displaying the sound icon, it would be even better if I could just mute selected tabs. In the following I’ll show you how to do this in Chrome for Windows, Mac or Unix.

Step 1: Open Chrome Experiments

chrome-tab-playing-audio

Muting tabs is a Chrome experiment which means that it’s not fully tested yet and might not work all the time. While this might be relevant and important for some tests, there should be nothing to worry about with this test. To access the Chrome Experiments tab, you have to copy and paste the following URL in a Chrome tab: chrome://flags/

 

Step 2: Find Enable Tab Audio Muting UI Control

chrome-experiments-tab-audio-muting

Next, find the Enable Tab Audio Muting UI Control setting and activate it. You can just hit ctrl + f (cmd + f on a Mac) and search for it or access it directly by copy and pasting the following URL to a new tab: chrome://flags/#enable-tab-audio-muting

 

Step 3: Done – Mute tab audio by clicking on the speaker icon

chrome-tab-muted-sound

Whenever you want to mute a tab, just click on the speaker icon and it will be muted. Clicking the icon for a second time will enable sound again.

Comments are closed.