You’re minding your own business, surfing the web and suddenly you start to hear a commercial or news report blaring through your computer’s speakers.
Most modern web browsers will help you figure out which tab the sound is coming from, by showing a speaker icon. Some, including Chrome and Firefox, will also let you mute that tab by giving it a right-click and then choosing the mute option.
But next time you visit that site, there’s a good chance the same thing will happen… but it looks like Google is working on a fix that will let you permanently mute pages on a per-domain basis.
Google’s François Beaufort notes that the new option shows up when you click the page info button in the location bar (the part that tells you if a site is secure or not).
You can choose whether to allow or block audio from the page, or you can choose “ask” if you want to grant the page permission to ask whether it should make noise every time you visit.
Beaufort says the Chrome team “is currently experimenting” with the feature. But you can give it a try by running the latest Chrome Canary build and turning on the experimental SoundContentSetting switch with the following flag:
–enable-features=SoundContentSetting
Eventually, the feature could make its way to Chrome’s dev, beta, and then stable channels.
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