Native Mute Feature Coming to Chrome
I'm pretty sure you know how annoying a website that automatically starts playing videos can be. It's especially "fun" when you have a bunch of tabs opened and are already listening to something when one of them suddenly starts talking, and you can't figure out which one. Google Chrome is working to fix that by offering its users a native mute function for each opened tab.
Recently, Google added an icon (next to the tab title) that helps Chrome show you which of your opened tabs is making the noise. The Dev channel took things one step further and made it possible for you to mute individual tabs by clicking on the previously mentioned icon. This is great news because you will no longer have to deal with annoying ads barging in, or news interfering with your music listening sessions.
At the moment this option is only available for the Chrome Dev or Chrome Canary releases (version 40.0.2147.0), but it will probably be featured in the public build pretty soon. If you are running Dev or Canary, all you have to do is type chrome://flags/#enable-tab-audio-muting into the address bar, and you will taken to a page where with a flag named Enable Tab Audio Muting UI, where you will need to click on the enable link. Then simply restart the browser, and the muting function will be enabled.
From my perspective, this new feature is really cool and, even though I am aware of the the already existing extensions for Google Chrome which offer similar functionality, I still think that having a native tab-muting option is much better and safer than having to install and use third-party extensions.
Source: LifeHacker
