We have all experienced it at one time or another, a website that starts blaring music or forcing videos into your browsing experience. Now, Google is testing a way to mute these sites for good.
Although it used to be uncommon, more and more sites are auto loading videos and blasting visitors with unwanted visuals and audio. While Google has for a while now offered a way to see where the sound is coming from by adding a speaker icon on the browser tab where the sound is active, it may now add an option that will allow users to permanently mute a website using its Chrome browser.
While the option to „perma-mute“ a website won’t be found in the current general build of Chrome, the latest experimental ‘Canary’ version does expose this feature. In order to enable it in the Canary build, users will just need to navigate to an offending site, then click on the site info tab icon that can be found in the left side of the address bar, before the actual web address. By clicking this, users will gain access to a variety of different options for images, popups, and the sound menu. Within the sound menu, the option will be available to mute the website. Once this setting is activated, it will be persistent until it is manually changed to allow the site to play audio.
Although this is currently in testing, if it rolls out to the general build, it could cause some websites to be a bit more cautious about how they present media content to their audience.
Source: TechCrunch
