If you are a regular Internet user, you might have opened a website at some point that automatically plays a video, which can be quite annoying.
This is so common in that we have seen people come up with solutions like extensions that disable such content from running and having a mute switch like the one featured in Opera browser.
Chrome is the most popular browser in the world current and sadly, it does not have an inbuilt feature for muting such annoying videos. Well, it seems that will be in the past soon.
According to a report by TechCrunch, Google is testing a muting feature within Chrome which would help you mute those sounds from the rogue tabs.
It is being tested on the Chrome Canary, which is a Google Chrome variant which gets experimental features that might be added on the regular version.
“The Chrome team is currently experimenting with a setting to mute/unmute a website directly from the Page info bubble,” François Beaufort said in his Google Plus page. “This will give you more control about which website is allowed to throw sound at you automatically.”
Apparently it is not hard to activate this. Just click on the security status of the website (shown by a info button or padlock button) then scroll down the options to sound. This setting will last until it is changed.
This move will discourage publishers with autoplay videos since they would be muted forever thanks to this setting. Adding to the fact that Google is also testing an adblock feature, this might force publishers to come up with other ways to serve ads to their readers.
