Chrome 100: tab audio muting is back
Google released the first three-digit version of Chrome Stable yesterday. The official release announcement was not all that spectacular, as no major features were highlighted by Google.
Chrome users who dig a bit deeper may have noticed that tab audio muting is available again in the browser. First introduced in 2014 by Google as a way to mute audio of specific tabs in the browser and then turned into a site-wide muting option in 2017, audio muting has since then become a feature of most modern web browsers in one form or another.
Chrome users who preferred tab muting over site muting had to install browser extensions such as Tab Muter or Smart Mute to bring back the functionality. Google added an experimental flag to the Canary version of the Chrome browser in early 2022 that restored the browser's tab muting capabilities.
The release of Chrome 100 to the Stable channel brings that experimental function to it as well. While it is still necessary to enable the feature on chrome://flags, doing so restores the ability to toggle audio with a click or tap on the audio icon of individual tabs.
Here is how you restore the functionality in Chrome 100 or newer:
- Load chrome://flags/#enable-tab-audio-muting in the browser's address bar.
- Set the flag to Enabled using its menu.
- Restart the Google Chrome web browser.
All audio icons become switches that allow you to toggle audio on or off for that particular tab after the restart. Unlike the original tab muting feature, Chrome 100's will mute audio playback of the site and not just the tab. If you have two Twitch or YouTube videos open with audio playing in both, hitting the audio icon will mute both and not just the active one.
Experimental flags may be removed at some point, but it would be strange if Google would remove this particular flag again after restoring it a few months earlier. Still, there is the possibility that the flag is removed and that tab audio muting is not enabled by default in Chrome.
You can check out our full guide on audio muting in Chrome, as it is updated regularly.
Now You: do you use the browser's audio muting option, if supported?
Vivaldi browser has the option to allow audio in just one tab or all of them.
Although i see no sense what so ever in having audio playing in 2 or more tabs.
The good news on at least Brave it seems to have solved the problem in case one has lot’s of tabs open as tabs become so small that the mute icon inside the tab takes almost whole space.
So when switching from another tab to the tab with playing media in the background it becomes veeeery fiddly as one have to place the cursor very precisely at around the tabs periphery to avoid just muting the background media.
Now after the update it instead brings that tab page back without muting, much better.
Now bring back BLOCK AUTOPLAY.
“If you have two Twitch or YouTube videos open with audio playing in both, hitting the audio icon will mute both and not just the active one.” Useless thing ever.
This is already fixed in Chrome Canary, I explained that in a comment I wrote several hours ago (it is pending approval because it contains several links).
Thanks, I hope they will fix completely this and it gives more funcionality to Chrome. :]
I don’t understand this, the icon is in the bat but we need to config it at flags? :[
Oh wow, tab muting, what’s next preventing autoplay / autoload of all of the scrolling videos?
That this is behind a flag reminds me of a problem I’ve been having with Chrom* on Android since version 98.* came out. Loading of the flags screen is very slow and often freezes for several seconds even on a fairly fast device. The number of flags is utterly huge. It’d be nice if the Chrom* programmers would institute a policy of removing flags after, say a year of testing, and either making them part of settings or simply removing them entirely.
Mozilla looking like a clown after removing it from firefox following its removal from chrome
You are the clown. Firefox never removed it.
@Anonymous
> You are the clown. Firefox never removed it.
Neither did Brave, or Vivaldi.
Absolutely
>If you have two Twitch or YouTube videos open with audio playing in both, hitting the audio icon will mute both and not just the active one.
This is already fixed in the Canary version, if you mute one tab, the other one keeps playing audio:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7e108bf19cdf7ea6d50cf38400d9a29676acd68b3a5b34b987f1fa5ae24353af.gif
If you want to mute all the tabs from the same site you have to click on the ‘Mute site’ option from the tab’s context menu.
>but it would be strange if Google would remove this particular flag again after restoring it a few months earlier.
No, it wouldn’t be strange at all, flags are not options, features that are enabled with flags can be removed at any time and, as I said in the post where I spotted the return of this feature, Google restored this option to do an experiment and decide if the ‘Mute’ button stays in the Global media controls or in the tabstrip:
https://redd.it/sdgzem
Many users think that flags are some kind of advanced options or something like that and they are not, a long time ago one of the Chromium developers explained the real purpose of flags:
https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/rh696s/comment/hoqdp6l
.
I have read “tab audio muting is back”. It’s common those days to put off some good features and then they the clever development teams make a new version to put it back again to get some applause and medals. This should named “to make a W11”. Thanks for the article! :]