How to mute tabs in Google Chrome with single click

Last Updated: February 8, 2016

Its very annoying when you hear sounds coming from an open tab in your browser and you are not able to figure it out from exactly which tab the sound is coming from. Some browsers provide inbuilt settings to overcome the issues and for some we have to go for add-ons.

In this article I will cover how to mute certain tabs in Google Chrome with the help of hidden settings in Google Chrome browser. I have also covered that with the help of an amazing add-on how you can mute tab in Mozilla Firefox.

How to mute tabs in Google Chrome

There could be extensions available in Web Store to mute the individual tabs in Google Chrome but when you have inbuilt settings available you should avoid using extensions. Below is the method to mute the noisy tabs in Chrome with single click.

Open Google Chrome.
Paste “chrome://flags/#enable-tab-audio-muting” in the address bar of your Google Chrome and hit Enter.
After this, look for “Enable tab audio muting UI control” and click on enable option. To see the effect you should restart your Chrome browser. This will add a sound icon to the tab playing audio or video file.
To check, after restarting Google Chrome open any website playing audio or better open YouTube and play any video. As soon as sound starts coming, an icon will appear on the header of that tab. If you click on that icon, it will mute that particular tab.

With the help of sound icon appearing on tab, Chrome helps you to figure out which tab is playing an audio.

How to disable sounds in Mozilla Firefox

Unlike Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox doesn’t have inbuilt settings to mute the tabs. To achieve this you have to go with the add-ons. Noise control is one the best add-on for Mozilla Firefox to disable the sounds coming from tabs.

This works same like Google Chrome. It will also add an icon to each tab playing audio or video file.

Open Mozilla Firefiox.
Navigate to Tools->Add-ons. Click on Get Add-ons tab.
In the search box, type in noise control. Look for noise control in the results and click on Add to Firefox.
After it gets installed, restart the browser. To check, open any website playing audio and you will see the sound icon in that tab only. You can click on that icon to mute the particular tab.

So this way you can mute tabs in Google Chrome with one click and an add-on to make your Mozilla Firefox get rid of annoying sounds coming from tabs.