This is one feature that many users are going to love. How many times has it happened to you that you click on a link to read an interesting, article or a story, and as you start reading it, you start hearing either some music, or jingle, or unknown audio through your computer speakers. And then you spend next couple of minutes trying to find the origin of that audio.
Also, the situation gets worst when you have multiple tabs open. If you are like me, you will have atleast 20-25 tabs open in your Chrome browser and it becomes a nightmare to find which particular video or an auto playing advertisement has got initiated.
Imagine you are sitting in a library on your laptop, and suddenly an audio starts playing, and you cannot quickly shut it down. It’s embarrassing. It has happened to me many a times – and I am sure most of you have suffered the same.
Till now there was not easy solution to address this problem – you could mute the audio directly through your machine’s sound settings, but that means you will not hear audio when you need it.
Thankfully, Google Chrome has taken notice and has introduced a mute button in their latest release. If you are using Chrome, your browser in all probability has already got updated. From version 46.0.2490.71 onwards, Google has released tab specific Mute button.
How to use Mute Tab?
Simply go to the specific tab that you want mute and right click on the top header bar of that specific tab and click on ‘Mute Tab’. Any auto playing video or an audio advt will be muted in that tab. So you can open any website without worrying about audio. As it is tab specific, you can easily play video or audio in the tabs that you want.
Muted tab will always have a mute sign shown, so you will know which tabs are muted and which are not..
While I find mute tab really useful, I would have really liked it to be more intelligent. It would have been nice if Chrome could figure out on its own a auto-playing video or an advt and asked me if I wanted to mute it, rather than me trying to mute various tabs.
It may happen in future versions, but till them ‘Mute tab’ is sure to be useful most of the times!
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