Google Chrome is finally bringing back the good way to mute tabs

Only available on the Canary channel for now

Chrome used to have an effortless way to mute tabs until Google replaced it in 2018 with the current, rather annoying one. However, a few months back, we saw evidence that the old way might return, and it’s now starting to arrive for users — albeit only those using Chrome Canary.

As spotted by Redditor u/Leopeva64-2, you can now mute Chrome tabs with a single click again. It’s only available on the experimental Chrome Canary channel at the moment, by enabling the following flag: chrome://flags/#enable-tab-audio-muting. When activated, the tab strip audio indicator will double as a toggle to mute or unmute any tab directly playing audio.

The feature is live on Chrome Canary for Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, and Fuchsia, which means it should come to the stable version at some point in the not-so-distant future (going through dev and beta on its way). Once enabled, you’ll be able to mute unnerving ads and other videos like a pro by just clicking on the speaker icon, as opposed to the former practice of right-clicking first then checking the Mute site option. The updated feature also treats tabs separately, regardless of whether they’re from the same site or not, so you’ll again be able to mute individual tabs rather than all tabs for the same site.

While we’re only just seeing the earliest live implementations of this feature, it’s been in the works for quite some time, as originally spotted by u/Leopeva64-2. That said, it isn’t new by any means, as it was already a part of Chrome before now until Google inexplicably removed it (talk about tech regression). Now that it’s back, though, you’ll be able to take advantage of it once more to mute annoying video ads that autoplay in the background with just one click.

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