As amazing as it was that Google implemented a new feature in Chrome that would show you which of your tabs was making noise, everyone was still disappointed when the company announced that it wouldn’t allow you to mute the tab. While Google has reversed its decision and is supposedly working to add a mute feature in the near future, a simple line of code can add that feature right now, no wait.
We have all been here before: you are researching a topic or simply browsing the web and have opened a ton of links as background tabs, all of a sudden, one of these tabs goes rogue and obnoxiously assaults your eardrums with a horrendous ad about say, dish-washing detergent, which abruptly halts your peaceful, Zen-like browsing state. You anxiously hunt for tabs, struggling to find the culprit. However, like your average modern-day attention-deprived techno junkie, the endless list of tabs you have open is proving difficult to hunt through. Enter Google, the savior of 21st century internet mavens. In an effort to preserve our sanity, Google introduced the audio icon for Chrome tabs in January, 2014, much to the delight of the global citizenry. Church bells rang and angels descended from the heavens, children danced in the streets, cats began to sing, teenagers and adults alike actually had something they could agree upon; world peace finally seemed within our grasp. Ok, maybe that last bit is a slight exaggeration. Nonetheless, the introduction of this feature gave us the ability to quickly hunt down noisy tabs and avoid the seemingly endless reach of advertisers, which is pretty darn awesome.
