Google Chrome To Roll Out Permanent Mute Button For Sites With Autoplaying Videos

If you’re a heavy user of the Chrome internet browser, and you most likely are, then Google has some changes in the works that will make your daily travails less nerve racking. There are few things more annoying on the internet than websites that autoplay videos — be it original content from the site itself or advertisements — that blast audio upon loading the page.

Google previously tackled this problem by flagging the tab of an offending website with a speaker icon. This allowed you to quickly spot which site/tab was causing all the ruckus, and either close it down or hit the pause button on the video. Now, Google is taking an additional step with a new “Mute” button. Mute is now featured in the latest experimental “Canary” build of the internet browser.

Accessing the mute button is as simple as clicking the tab that resides to the left of the address bar (the tab displays either “Secure” or an information icon depending on the site your visiting), and scrolling down to Sound. From there, you will find the option to mute/unmute the current website. Once muted, your ears will be spared from annoying sounds from that site until you decide to back and reset the option.

This option is available on a per-site basis, so just hitting mute on some random site won’t affect viewing your favorite Frasier scenes on YouTube. According to François Beaufort, the Google Chrome developer that announced the feature, you will first have to enable it using the --enable-features=SoundContentSetting switch.

We must say, this is an easy to access and incredibly handy feature that we hope will graduate into beta, and eventually general release versions of Google Chrome.