Google Chrome might soon let you permanently mute websites that autoplay videos or audio

As great as the internet is, there are some things that just make the whole experience not that enjoyable. For example, you open Google Chrome to navigate to your favorite news site and then out of nowhere, some audio just starts playing. Wondering whether you accidentally pressed play on a video or audio somewhere, you go on the search for the source.

Your search leads you to the discovery that actually a video just started playing and it’s the source of the audio. So you pause the video and go about your way. Then one day, you visit another site and the same thing happens again. Now it’s getting a bit annoying right so you might just end up putting your laptop on mute so that you don’t hear the video auto-playing.

A problem quickly arises when you’re listening to some music on streaming services like Spotify and again a video starts auto playing while you’re browsing the web and enjoying your music. Well, Google Chrome is working on a new feature that will let you permanently mute just those websites that you constantly visit but annoy you because they have videos that just autoplay out of the blue.

The feature is currently in an experimental phase in the Google Chrome Canary browser which is just like the Chrome that we’re all used. The Google Chrome Canary browser is the one that Google uses to test new features that it would like to roll out to the main browser that many of us use. So because it’s still in experimental phase, it might come or it might not.

Now if you’d like to already start using the feature, you can download the Google Chrome Canary browser. Once you’ve done that, head over to one of those sites that you know autoplay videos when you’re trying to access some written content from it. When you’re there, look at the URL tab right at the top.

You should see an icon right at the start of the URL bar that will be an “i” if the site is not using a secure connection, or a padlock if the site is using a secure connection. After clicking that, you’ll be presented with a list containing details about the website and the permissions that it currently has.

From that list, look for the where it says “sound” and then to the right where the word sound will be, you’ll see the current setting of sound output for that website. It will probably be allowed by default so just change that to do not allow. The moment you do that, any sound that the website tries to output will be muted.

The website will stay muted until you go back to the permissions list again and change it. So it will be a permanent mute of some sort. Hopefully, the fear of having their website muted forever could have some of the owners of that website that autoplay videos stopping that practice. I don’t even know why they do it, especially if I had not visited their site for the video or audio.

Anyways, let us know what you think. Do you think that this feature is needed? Has this been a problem for you or not? What other kinds of quality of life features would you like to see coming in Chrome or in any other browser that you use?