You are surfing Internet in Google chrome and then suddenly some websites start playing sound. Generally, these sounds origins from the hidden ads on the webpages which are quite difficult to see, especially if you have opened many tabs at the same time. However google adds a small speaker icon on the tab from which the sound is coming. But to stop the sound you have to either find the playing video/sound on the webpage and then pause it or you have to mute your system sound.
But there is a far better way to deal with annoying and unwanted sounds coming from the webpages. You just need to perform a small tweak and the speaker icon on the tab turns into mute button. You can click on it without opening the tab, and chrome mutes the sound for that tab. However, you can still play the sound from other tabs. This feature can be enabled by accessing the flags in the Chrome browser. It hardly takes a minute but can be very useful once it enabled.
Enable tab muting feature in Google Chrome
- In address bar of the chrome type chrome://flags and look for the Tab audio muting UI control flag. You can search by pressing ctrl+F.
- Click on the Enable link.
- A pop up will be shown up to restart the browser. Click Relaunch Now to restart the browser.
- Now to test it out, open YouTube.com and start playing any video. You will see the same audio icon on the tab, but this time it should also be a clickable button. Clicking the button will mute the sound for that tab only. You do not even need to open the tab to mute the audio.
One can argue that sound can be muted simply using a keyboard button, but this tweak allows you to mute the audio on a per tab basis. When you do not want to hear audio from a certain tab, just click on the small speaker icon to turn it off. Later, you can again click the same button to turn the audio on.