How to “Mute” the Audio From a Tab in Chrome

This brief guide will show you how to silence a specific tab (or tabs) in Google’s Chrome web browser. This is particularly helpful if you have a tab open to a page with audio that you don’t want to hear due to another tab (or App) already using sound.

Let’s say you’re listening to iTunes while you read the news. You open a page and a video clip or an ad starts to play audio automatically, loudly, on top of the music already playing in iTunes. Seriously annoying. Here’s how you can “mute” that tab so that no matter what page you’re viewing, it won’t hijack your audio :)

1. Locate the tab you want to mute. If you have a bunch of tabs open and you’re not sure which one is making sound, it will be identified with a little ‘speaker’ icon in the tab itself (see screenshot below).
2. Right-click (Mac users ctrl+click) the tab you want to silence and select Mute Tab from the pop-up menu.
3. That’s it! The speaker icon will have a strikethrough to indicate the sound is off for that tab.
4. If/when you want to Unmute that tab, right-click it again and this time select Unmute Tab