NEW YORK: An update to Google’s Chrome browser last year let you see which tab was playing sound by displaying a little speaker icon on the tab. The natural progression has finally occurred, and the new version of Chrome (version 46) will let you mute individual tabs.
It was all well and good to see, at a glance, which tab was making a racket, but then you had to hunt for the pause button on the autoplaynig video, or silence the ad responsible. Now, you can just right click on the offending tab and select “Mute Tab” from the drop down list to kill the audio on the page. Doing that permanently displays the speaker ion with a slash across it, so you can go back and unmute it without having to memorise which of the many tabs it was. Google has been testing out the feature for a while, and it’s now available to all users.
