• Chrome 71 Mute Tab

Keyboard shortcuts for muting tabs. Default setup: - Mute/Unmute current tab - Alt + Shift + M - Mute all except current one - Alt+Shift+N - Mute/Unmute all tabs - Alt + Shift + Comma Keybindings can be edited through the 'Keyboard Shortcut' menu at the bottom right in the Chrome extension settings.

You've been there: You're in an important meeting and suddenly, without warning, one of your tabs starts blaring with an ad. You scramble, but you have too many tabs open. It's impossible.

Google blessed us with a speaker icon in Chrome last year that appears on a tab header when that tab is the source of sound in order to more quickly identify it. But Google knows even that's not enough; you still had to toggle to that tab, navigate to the audio player or video ad on the page, and find the pause button. The latest version of Google Chrome — version 46 — lets you mute individual tabs by simply right-clicking on the tab and selecting mute tab from the dropdown menu.

The company has been testing the feature for about a year, but it's now available for all users.

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To check if you have the latest version of Chrome, click the button with three short, stacked lines on the top-right side of your browser window. From there, seleect Help and About and then About Google Chrome. You'll see a line that indicates if your browser is up to date.

The new feature may surprise some; at one point, Google said it wouldn't create the option to mute tabs because it didn't want the browser to control content. Chromium evangelist François Beaufort posted this explanation on Google+ last year:

After much debate, we decided not to proceed with a tab mute control, as this crosses a very important line: If we provide Chrome controls for content, we're implying that Chrome should take on a responsibility to police content.

Today, users are (rightfully) mad at misbehaving content for doing things like auto-playing annoying ad audio, but they should continue to pressure web site authors to change this behavior. Also, some have pointed out that there is already a mute button to the right of the audio indicator (the 'X'). In all seriousness, note that many web pages will register onClose() events to monitor when users leave their site. Thus, closing the tab will be a very strong signal to the web sites that their annoying ads are scaring all their users away!

For 'behaving' content, we think it's reasonable for a user to click on a tab and use the content's media controls to stop playback. In this case, a Chrome tab mute control would be redundant. This redundancy is bad since it can confuse users (e.g., to play a video and forget that a tab was muted days ago); and, based on experience, confused users often report unexpected behaviors as browser bugs, which would be a big distraction to the Support and Eng staff.

But Google wasn't opposed to Chrome extensions muting tabs, if they were reviewed and approved by the Chromium team. Mute tab shortcuts and Mute inactive tabs are a few available in the Chrome web store.

Chrome 71 Mute Tab

But Chrome has changed its tune to one of golden silence, so you can finally hush that tab with a simple click.