How do I individually mute audio per tab in Chrome or Firefox?

Question

Is there a way (in Chrome/Firefox) to individually mute audio per page/tab? This would be great when listening to music while browsing sites that play audio without asking for user prompt first.

Solution 1

Since version 42, Firefox has a native icon to show what tabs are playing sounds, and it is possible to click on this icon to mute them:

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On Chrome, type this in the address bar to enable the same feature as Firefox: chrome://flags/#enable-tab-audio-muting. After you enable it, you need to restart the browser to make it work.

Solution 2

For Chrome: In the address bar, go to chrome://flags/#enable-tab-audio-muting, then near the highlighted text on the resulting page, click on 'Enable'. Then, restart Chrome.

When enabled, the audio indicators in the tab strip double as tab audio mute controls. This also adds commands in the tab context menu for quickly muting multiple selected tabs.

Comments

[therobyouknow]

+1 actually this is better than the accepted answer as it is built in and not 3rd party (no need to download, no risk). It works for both HTML5-based media content AND Flash - I've just tested both. Thank you, this is exactly what I was looking for. I'll no need to look for the Firefox equivalent to be able to accept this as the answer or otherwise I may consider rewriting the question for just Chrome. I'll come back...

[Admin]

@therobyouknow See my updated answer: superuser.com/a/370557/33758 . Your wish is now a native feature on both browsers.

[therobyouknow]

+1 on your comment @screener thanks. I had already upvoted your answer.

[tvt173]

I hope someone makes an extension that has mute on by default, and you unmute a tab when you actually want to hear something.