Google is reportedly making it easier for users mute audio from a specific tab. As per a report by Chrome Story, the latest builds of Chrome Canary come with a new flag called “Tab audio muting UI control.” Once enabled, the flag will enable a feature that will allow you to mute audio playing in any app with a single click. Currently, the browser displays a sound indicator on the tab when an audio is playing. The report suggests that the new feature will use the indicator as a button to mute the audio.
As of now, you can open the right-click menu on a tab to mute the audio. With the new feature, you won’t have to go through an additional step to mute the audio. Similar functionality was alo rolled out by Chrome’s rival browser, Firefox, recently. As spotted by Reddit user Leopeva64-2, the commit message in the flag mentions that it is an experiment to decide if the new button should remain.
How to get the new mute button on Chrome
If you want to try the new feature for yourself, download Chrome Canary, open chrome://flags, search for “Tab audio muting UI control,” and set it to Enabled. Chrome will likely ask to reboot, and after it does, you should see the mute button. The flag is available on macOS, Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS — Android (even Android on tablets) is left out, at least for now.
You can try the new feature in the latest version of Chrome Canary by going to chrome://flags > Tab audio muting UI control > set it to Enabled. Once you enable this feature, Chrome will ask you to reboot. You will be able to see the new mute button after you restart the browser.
Google is also reportedly working on Windows 11-style overlay scrollbars for Chrome browser. For those who don’t know, scrollbars in Windows 11 change shape whenever you approach them or use them. As per a report by Neowin, the same feature is now being tested in Chromium.
