Till now Google Chrome allows to mute a tab that is playing audio, but the muting is limited to that tab is only. Chromium team comes up with a new experimental feature to widen that to the entire site, which now under testing.

The feature, once activated, lets you mute annoying sites that autoplay videos permanently via sound setting offered in the page info bubble. Currently, you can able to test this feature in Chrome Canary by running it with switch –enable-features=SoundContentSetting.

Google Chrome’s Site muting feature

Here is how you can enable it and test.

1. Launch Canary with the above mentioned flag

2. Visit any site like YouTube,

3. Click on Page info bubble and click on new ‘Sound’ setting, and choose ‘Always block sound on this site’, Chrome shows infobar on top to reload the page to apply updated settings, do that.

4. Done, you permanently muted YouTube from playing sound in the Chrome browser. You can do like this for other sites also.

Those who complain about accessing long page info popup as pain, can right click on site and choose ‘Mute Site’ (Mute tab was there before).

With this feature enabled, tab muting gets disabled. In fact, Site Muting will replace tab muting, so you shouldn’t be confused with two features, that’s what Google plan was.

“AUDIO” vs “SOUND” was debated here, but we decided on “SOUND” because the setting is labelled “Sound” on the UI, so it’ll be consistent with the UI. Also, the “AUDIO” for tab muting above will eventually be removed as it will be replaced by this feature.”

Let us see if this experimental feature gets into the browser as a feature, if that happens that would be a good news for users.

Check Implement desktop UI for site muting bug.