Slowly, steadily, Google has been adding features to Chrome to give users more control over the multimedia powers of tabs. Flash was the first target and over the last few years, audio has clearly been the follow-up. Now it seems Google plans to provide the ultimate in sound gatekeeping — muting of entire websites.
Muting websites in Chrome is currently the domain of extensions, however, according to Google “happiness evangelist” François Beaufort, the ability to put a sock in audio-happy websites is in the pipeline as a native feature for the company’s browser.
If you’re running the latest version of Chrome Canary, you can enable website muting right now using the following startup switch:
--enable-features=SoundContentSetting
You can then click on the padlock / information icon to the left of a site’s URL and among the other blocking options, you’ll see a speaker button, which you can toggle to mute that particular site.
Tab-muting is great and all, but if you happen to reload the troublesome site in another tab or session, it’s just going to catch you again. The new muting method will remember the setting for that site, so you never have to worry about it scaring the crap out of you again.
François Beaufort [Google+, via Liliputing]
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