New innovations and improvements are constantly being developed, tested and introduced to popular browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, IE, Opera, etc. and today we will share with you information regarding the latest Google Chrome feature that might soon get officially implemented within the browser. The new option that is currently being tested is a feature which would allow the user to permanently mute any sound coming from any website/webpage. This would be useful since a lot of sites out there tend to play music or even videos with sound without even asking for the user’s agreement. At times this could get rather annoying, especially if you still need to visit such a site over and over again (for example, you need it for your work, studies, etc.).
In development
The mute feature, however, is still not an official part of the Chrome browser. At the moment, it is still being tested and is only available on Google Chrome Canary – a version of the browser that has been specifically created for developers, beta testing and early adopters. It can be downloaded for free from Google’s website but users are warned that due to the experimental nature of the program, it could sometimes experience issues and/or even crash and break down completely. That said, if you use Chrome Canary, you could try out the mute feature on it and see for yourself how it works.
How to enable it on Canary
Apart from being only available on Chrome Canary, the mute option cannot be outright accessed since the feature isn’t available by default. In order to have the ability to use it, a quick procedure must first be carried out on your browser. Here is how to do it:
- Firstly, find your Google Chrome Canary icon and make a right-click on it.
- Go to Properties and select the Shortcut tab.
- In the text field labeled with Target, copy-paste the following line of text: –enable-features=SoundContentSetting.
- Now, select Save and open the browser.
- At the browser window, there should be an ⓘ button left of the URL of whatever site is currently visited – click on that ⓘ button.
- A drop-down menu should appear, look at the bottom of it and click on the option Sound.
- Three options should appear: Use global default (Allow), Always allow on this site and Always block on this site. The first option allows sound/music to be played on all sites that you visit, the second would specifically allow sound to be played on the current site and the third one would restrict that. Choose the one which best suits your need.
A sidenote
Bear in mind that even though the feature can be used on Canary, this is not to say that it will certainly be introduced to the regular Google Chrome browser – testing is still underway and only time will tell whether or not the option becomes an official part of Chrome. Not long ago the developers behind Chrome came up with another neat feature that has now been added to Chrome Canary which signals users when a suspicious extension might be hijacking the browser’s proxy settings and rerouting the traffic through third-party servers or when the new tab page has been altered without the user’s permission. If you want to test any upcoming new features for Chrome, you can get the Canary version and check them out right now.
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