Google Chrome might soon let you permanently mute noisy websites

Autoplay videos can be quite irritating when browsing the web, especially ones that starts with blaring sounds as soon as you open a website. In order to provide users with a solution to this problem, François Beaufort, an open-source Chromium evangelist recently wrote on Google+ that the company is experimenting with “a setting to mute and unmute” websites using the page info bubble.

This feature claims to provide users with more control over which websites are allowed to throw sounds at them automatically. Currently, Chrome allows users to mute tabs by right clicking them, however, this is cancelled out as soon as the tab or Chrome is closed. The new Muting feature will allow users to set a permanent, persisting mute upon websites. The mute feature is available only on Chrome Canary for now where it's being tested, but is expected be rolled out to the public build of Chrome in a matter of weeks.

In Chrome Canary, the sound toggle is placed on the page info bubble, or the secure label for https supported websites in the far left of the address bar. Clicking on the info bubble/secure label drops down a menu which displays various options such as microphone, camera, javascript and now the mute sound option which can be set to block, allow or a default always ask. The feature is turned off by default, so users need to run it with the --enable-features=SoundContentSetting switch.

Shubham Sharma  shubham.sharma@digit.in

Working on a miniaturised version of the Arc Reactor.