How to Quickly Mute a Chrome Tab That’s Playing Audio

In one of its last updates, Chrome rolled out a feature that puts up a speaker icon next to any tab that’s playing audio or video. It might look like a small, inconsequential upgrade, but make no mistake, this is a lifesaver. Especially when one of those auto playing video ads start on a web page. Instead of wasting your time digging through all the tabs you have open, you can directly navigate to the tab where the video/audio is playing and stop it.
While adding the speaker icon, the developers covertly injected a feature that can turn the icon into a mute button. However, the feature is still experimental and therefore needs to be upgraded from Chrome’s Flags page. It’s ‘experimental’ though, meaning it might not work and could possibly break your Chrome. So proceed at your own risk.

Enabling the Chrome Mute Button

As this is a Flag feature, open up the chrome://flags/ page and look for the feature that reads Enable tab audio muting UI control. If you are browsing from Chrome, you can click on this link to go there. Now all you need to do is enable the feature and restart the browser. Make sure you use the Restart button located at the bottom. This will help you keep the session history while restarting.
Chrome Flag Feature

You should now see the speaker icon on the tabs that are playing audio, but this time the icons will be interactive and you can simply click on them to mute the entire page. The control doesn’t extend to increasing or decreasing the volume of that tab, at least not at the moment. But for starters, it’s good enough.

Using the Feature

The feature can come in handy when you are listening to online radio or a music streaming website and you suddenly find an interesting video you want to watch. Now, instead of opening the music tab, you can directly mute the song for the time being using the audio icon and once you are done with the video, just click on the same icon again to get back to your audio stream.
mute button
Cool Tip: You can turn YouTube videos into floating PIP screens and watch them while working on other Chrome Tabs using this simple extension.
Also, when you need a bit of focus while reading an article, the mute button is just a click away. Basically, it saves time and that’s enough to convince me to use the feature.

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