Earlier this year our favorite web browser, Chrome, got a nice little update that let us know when audio was being played in another tab. If you’re an avid Chrome user than you have already seen the little speaker generating audio waves on tabs that have a video or music playing. Now, Google is experimenting with a new feature that will allow users to mute any audio notifications in the Chrome browser. Reportedly, Google says the reason why they are experimenting with this feature is because users thought that at some point they could click on the tab to silence the audio. Unfortunately enough, Google isn’t promising that this feature will make it to a stable release of Chrome.
The news of this new feature comes from Peter Kasting, who shared a post on his Google+ page saying, “I’ve heard several times that people liked the audio indicator we added to Chrome tabs, but thought they could click it to mute the tab in question.” Kasting later adds, “As of last night, there’s an experimental flag to provide such UI.” Included in Kasting’s post were links to the Chromium source page. On the site, Google shared their thoughts with us about the experimental feature saying, “This change consolidates all of the existing media indicator UI into a new MediaIndicatorButton class. When the indicator is transitioned to the audio playing or muting state, the button functionality activates; and, when clicked, will toggle tab-wide audio muting. Otherwise, the view only serves to paint the indicator icon with all mouse/gesture events handled by Tab (its parent View).”
In the end, the newly experimental feature will be deemed to have purpose if later added to a stable release of Chrome. Being able to mute notifications directly from the tab would not only be easy and quick, but will also kill the confusion that came along when people thought at first that you could silence the audio from the tab. If you’re interested in learning more about how to control the audio alerts in Chrome, you can visit Google’s Chromium page for more information. Also don’t forget to share your thoughts with us about this experimental feature.