There are many reasons why you want to disable a tab in your favorite browser. Perhaps you open multiple tabs and one of them automatically plays ads? It’s so loud that it scares you and possibly the neighbors, so you’re desperate to determine which tab it’s playing on. You get so frustrated that you just start closing them all one by one until the sound finally fades away.
Things like this can get annoying very quickly. Fortunately, modern desktop web browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox have given you the ability to eliminate such annoyances without taking up precious time and sanity. Let us show you how to mute a tab in Chrome, Safari, Firefox and other browsers.
How to mute browser tab sound in Chrome, Safari, Firefox and more
First of all, you need to know how to determine which tab is trying to blow out your eardrum. The culprit tab can be easily identified by the one with the speaker icon on it.
All you have to do is find this icon and you will know which tab to go to. Now all that remains is to end his realm of auditory terror without killing the tab itself.
Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Brave
All three of these browsers have the same approach to mute the browser tab sound. Each of them will display a speaker icon inside the tab itself. All you have to do to stop the noise is to click the icon in the tab. It will change from the normal volume icon to a forward slash icon to indicate that the tab is muted.
If for some reason the icon is too small for you, or you try to click on it but accidentally keep pressing the X so close to the right of it, there is another method to disable the tab. You can right-click a tab to open a short menu. Find the Mute tab and click it. The problem has been resolved.
– /
Something that Google Chrome and Brave share that Firefox lacks is the ability to disable all tabs from a specific site right in the tab. In the same menu, you will find a Mute Site, which will do what is written, but for all tabs from this site now and in the future.
All three of these great browsers also boast an auto-mute feature. This means you can set it up so that annoying ads with blaring music and sounds are automatically turned off. The tab mute feature in Chrome and other browsers allows you to whitelist sites that may and may not automatically play sounds.
The auto mute feature in Google Chrome and Brave can be found by going to Settings> Additional settings> Privacy & security> Site settings (or Content settings)> Sound. Then you can start adding sites that no longer require sounds to play automatically.
Firefox follows a similar, but shorter path. Go to Settings> Privacy & Security> Autoplay. From here you can change the option in the dropdown menu to “Block Sound†and start adding websites to the whitelist.
Apple Safari and Opera
Disabling Browser Tab in Safari and Opera is similar to the aforementioned browsers in this article. You can find the volume icon and click it, or right-click the tab and select the Mute tab. They differ in that Safari also has an active “Disable this tab” tab. The address bar contains a speaker icon that you can use to mute the sound on the tab you are on.
If you right-click a tab in Opera, you can mute the sound on other tabs. This feature can be incredibly handy if you’re focusing on one browser tab and don’t want to be annoyed by other tabs that might display autoplay ads.
Microsoft Edge
Microsoft Edge is a mansion in this article. It has a volume icon to let you know the tab is playing sound, but unlike other browsers, it doesn’t have a direct way to disable the browser tab.
Instead, you will need to right-click on the speaker icon in the notification area at the bottom-right corner of the screen and select Open Volume Mixer.
Next, you will need to find the Edge browser tab that is playing audio. Once discovered, click the speaker icon below the page title to mute the sound. To turn on the sound, you need to either repeat this process again, or simply close and reopen the tab.
Until Microsoft gets to releasing their browser in the 2020s, the only thing you can really do is either use a different browser or stop the sound entirely.
To prevent sounds from playing indefinitely instead of having to turn off each one individually, you can prevent Edge from playing any sounds at all.
- Go to the control panel.
- Click Internet Options.
- Click the Advanced tab and scroll down to the Multimedia section.
- Uncheck the Play Sounds On Web Pages checkbox.
To re-enable sounds, you will need to follow the same steps to check the box again, except for “Play sounds on web pages.”
–