Chrome 100: Tab audio muting is back
Google yesterday released the first three-digit version of Chrome Stable. The official launch announcement wasn’t that spectacular, as Google didn’t highlight any major features.
Chrome users digging a little deeper may have noticed that tab audio muting is now available in the browser again. First introduced in 2014 by Google as a way to mute audio from specific tabs in the browser and then made a site-wide mute option in 2017, audio muting has since become a feature of the app. most modern web browsers in one way or another.
Chrome users who preferred to mute tabs instead of muting sites had to install browser extensions like Tab Muter or Smart Mute to get the functionality back. 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 in the stable channel also gives you that experimental feature. While you still need to enable the feature in chrome://flags, doing so restores the ability to toggle audio by clicking or tapping the audio icon on individual tabs.
This is how you restore functionality in Chrome 100 or later:
- Load chrome://flags/#enable-tab-audio-muting in the browser address bar.
- Set the flag to Enabled using its menu.
- Restart the Google Chrome web browser.
All audio icons turn into toggles that allow you to turn audio on or off for that particular tab after reboot. Unlike the original tab muting feature, Chrome 100 will mute audio playback from the site and not just the tab. If you have two Twitch or YouTube videos open with audio playing in both, pressing the audio icon will mute both and not just the active one.
The experimental flags may be removed at some point, but it would be strange if Google removed this particular flag again after restoring it a few months earlier. Still, there is a chance the flag is removed and tab audio muting is not enabled by default in Chrome.
You can check out our full guide on muting audio in Chrome as it is regularly updated.
Now you: Do you use the browser’s audio mute option, if supported?
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