How to Mute and Unmute Tabs Without Right-click in Google Chrome [Tutorial]

How To Mute Google Chrome Tabs

Chrome is already doing us a huge favor by indicating which of the many tabs we have open are actually playing music. You can easily identify them by the small speaker icon inside the tab-description:

This makes it easy to find the annoying tab and simply close it. If you still need it, however, there are two other ways to mute Chrome tabs.

1. Mute Tab Via Right-Click

This works with tabs playing music as well as tabs that do not even have audio or a video playing. Hover over the tab and right-click. In the menu, choose “mute tab” and that’s it. The tab will be muted until you un-mute it again.

2. Set A Flag To Mute Tabs With One Click

If you want a faster way to mute your tabs in Chrome, there is a flag you can set to easily do so. In order to set this flag in your browser, enter the following into your browsers URL field:

There, click on “Enable” under “Tab audio muting UI control”. Afterwards, a relaunch of your browser will be needed. Once restarted, you can find a minimal change when it comes to the small speaker icon shown above. Now, when hovering your mouse over it, it changes to a crossed out speaker symbol.

Now, all you need to do, is click on the speaker and the tab will be muted!

Note:

Please note that muting a tab will NOT pause the video or music that is playing. It will merely mute the tab so you can’t or don’t have to hear the sound anymore. If you want to pause a video that is open in another tab, you have to go to the respective tab and pause it.

Want to get in touch with us? Hit us up on our social media channels!

Video

Mute a tab in Microsoft Edge (Chromium)

Microsoft’s new version of Edge is based on Google’s Chromium open-source code, bringing it closer to Chrome. Like Google’s browser, you can click on the Speaker icon next to the site’s name in the tab to mute. Click it again to unmute. Simple.

Likewise, you can right-click on a noisy tab and select Mute Tab on the drop-down menu. Repeat to turn the audio back on.

The Chromium version of Microsoft Edge also provides the ability to deny sites from playing sounds altogether. To access this feature, follow these steps:

Step 1: Click the three-dot Ellipsis icon located in the top right corner and select Settings on the drop-down menu.

Step 2: Select Site Permissions listed on the left.

Step 3: Scroll down and select Media Autoplay on the right.

Step 4: Next to Control if Audio and Video Automatically Play on Sites, select Limit from the drop-down menu.

As the browser states, media will be blocked based on the tabs you previously blocked. The browser will apply this change to all new tabs going forward.

Post navigation

Previous Previous post: You will be able to run Windows apps natively in Android soon

Next Next post: How to get Windows 10 installation date

Mute a tab in Safari

Safari remains a popular browser for users of MacOS, and the software doesn’t lack in features, allowing you to mute a tab easily. Like other browsers, find the Speaker icon, located to the right of the website’s name on the tab, and click it to mute. You can also click on the Speaker icon next to the website’s address to perform the same functions.

If preferred, you can also right-click on a tab, then select Mute Tab on the drop-down menu. Repeating these steps will allow you to reverse your decision and return audio to the tab.

To mute other tabs playing music, right-click on the Speaker icon in the Smart Search field (address bar) and select the Mute Other Tabs option on the drop-down menu.

To mute all tabs, click on the Speaker icon located in the Smart Search field (address bar). Click it again to bring the music back.

2. Google Chrome Flag Updates

Google Chrome has been updated to a whole new level in a year’s time. While previously, you could have used the flag for ‘Tab audio muting UI control’  in the search bar for chrome flags, but now, this flag has been removed entirely from the list. That, however, does not mean that you cannot mute a tab on chrome anymore. You can, but the option you will be now using will be under the title ‘Sound content settings‘ in chrome flags. And whereas in ‘Tab audio muting UI control’, you used to Enable the settings to mute a tab, for ‘Sound content settings‘ you will ‘Disable’ the option.

If you still don’t get it, follow the steps mentioned below.

1. Open the Chrome flags following the same old methods. type in, ‘chrome://flags’ in your search bar for Google and the screen for flags will open. Or, simply type in ‘chrome://flags/#sound-content-setting’

2. Now from the screen that appears, you can search for the title ‘Sound content settings’ by typing this in the search space provided on top of this screen.

3.  The settings for this tab are set on default, which is why we only see the option for ‘mute site’. To change this option to mute ‘tab’, we need to click on the downward-facing blue arrow right opposite ‘default’ which will open a dropdown list of options to choose from.

4. Select the option ‘Disabled’. And now you will be asked to relaunch Chrome. You need to click on the tab for a relaunch that appears in the bottom right corner of the screen. All your currently open tabs will close done, and re-open within the next few seconds so don’t worry about losing any data.
5. Now, once Google Chrome has been relaunched, and all your tabs have been restored, you can now mute tabs by following the same method we used to mute ‘site’. Right, click on the tab that you want to mute, and notice that the option has now been redesigned and says ‘mute tab’ instead of ‘mute site’.

Conclusion

For years I have been looking for a browser feature that can automatically pause or mute music or video when the user plays audio in another tab. But I haven’t found the feature on any browser, which, as I recently found out, might be due to certain limitations. However, the mute button is the closest anything has got to what I want when it comes to controlling media output on the browser. I am hoping it works for you as smoothly as it did for me.

Tags