Who would have thought Google revisits the changes they made to Chrome years back and restores them, especially if it was a flag? That’s a surprise, happened this time about the Tab Muting flag which the company removed 3 years back. As of now, the experimental feature is available in Chrome 100 Canary and you can mute a media tab by clicking the speaker icon once. Google may restore the feature after testing its usage of it in the stable by running an experiment.
Tab Muting flag returns
When Chrome introduced the Tab Audio indicator aka the Speaker icon, it also added a flag with the ability to mute a tab with a single click.
It remained as a flag, but contrary to others, it lasted for four years, company removed it in 2018 citing Chrome needs to police content if they provide muting control.
Chrome has introduced site muting after that. From then, you can able to mute tabs of a site rather than an individual tab.
To mute a tab, you need to right-click and select the “Mute Site” option. There are extensions still available to mute tabs even today.
Whereas Firefox and the new Microsoft Edge allow muting the audio/video playing tab with a single click when you click on the volume indicator on the tab.
Google is bringing back the ability to mute tabs in Chrome with a single click
Recently, suddenly, the Chromium team changed their mind and reverted the change saying they’re “bringing it back”.
It returned today to Canary after this CL.
“Enable tab muting behind a flag”
“The CL reimplements the tab muting feature that was previously removed in 2018. The implementation follows the original UX proposal of making the existing tab alert indicator into a clickable button but removes the hover and double click behavior“.
Still, there is no guarantee, tab muting returns as a Chrome feature. Google may decide its fate after running a tab muting feature experiment on 1% of the stable population.
In case you don’t know, Global Media Controls also provides the mute option, albeit in the Canary version. In the end, there could be only mute control, either it could be on the tab strip or in GMC. Users may prefer the former to the latter.
How to mute tabs in Chrome now
- Launch Chrome 100 Canary
- Visit chrome://flags
- Load chrome://flags/#enable-tab-audio-muting
- In the dropdown select Enabled and restart the browser.
- Visit a video hosting site such as YouTube and play a video, click on the audio indicator on the tab to mute it.
Are you missing the tab muting control? Let us know in the comment below
Summary: Google is bringing the dead tab muting feature to life again. The company plans to run an experiment on its fate. The flag is available in canary right now to mute tabs with a single click.
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