Google Chrome first added the speaker icon to tabs with active sound playing in 2014, eventually adding the ability to mute the tab by pressing on the speaker icon the following year. For some reason, though, Google removed the one-click mute button in 2018, instead leaving the right-click > mute tab menu option as the only way to mute a tab. In August 2021, a Reddit user on the /r/Chrome subreddit spotted that the feature was making its way back into the code, and sure enough, in January 2022, it came back, although it initially required editing the settings yourself as a bit of a Google Chrome lifehack.
Why was such a simple, useful, and unobtrusive feature removed in the first place, though? “The official reason is a combination of a large number of factors, but primarily that this is a symptom band-aid that doesn’t address the underlying problems that lead to people wanting to mute tabs, and we should be spending our time addressing those problems,” explained Peter Kasting, a developer of Chromium, the open source project that powers Chrome, in a Reddit comment. “Contributing factors include potential dataloss [sic] risk, code complexity, behavioral complexity, and confusing interactions with mute-whole-site capabilities that the general userbase finds more compelling.”
Kasting further added that “[t]he functionality of muting an individual tab still remains accessible to extensions, which can mute tabs on-demand or automatically in response to heuristics; the intent is that extension developers provide options here beyond what [is] built in.” This led to a healthy slate of extensions that not only reproduced the functionality but extended it, pun not intended.
