Hi Dave. I read a ton of comic book news sites and too many of them have annoying auto-play video ads. Worse, if I mute the video and go to another tab, it’ll start up again. Is there any way to figure out which tabs are producing audio and mute them on my Mac?
Ah yes, the super annoying auto-play video ads that include audio content and are often below the fold or otherwise where you can’t immediately see them and figure out what’s producing the sound. I’ve encountered them all too often and if you tend to have a lot of tabs open at any given time, it’s too darn common for a site to have content suddenly start playing without you even viewing that particular page. Really annoying.
You don’t, of course, want to just mute the computer entirely because you might be listening to music or watching video content on the active tab, a perfectly reasonable activity!
The problem with this situation is that most browsers don’t offer any help in this situation at all.
For example, if you have a bunch of tabs open in Apple’s Safari browser and one of the has audio, you don’t see nuthin’ of use:
In this case, the Amazon tab (in the background) has an Amazon video streaming. But the menu options are pretty useless.
Same thing with Firefox too:
Again, YouTube has the new Star Wars trailer running in the background, but there’s no indication that the audio is coming from that tab, nor is there any option of muting the audio.
And then there’s Google Chrome, which does have this ability!
First off, you can see which tab has audio playing:
In this case you can see that Amazon.com has audio from the tiny microphone icon.
Even better, right click (or Control-click) on the tab, whether it’s in the foreground or background, and:
Mute tab. Indeed. So there’s your solution: use Google Chrome. 🙂
I’m using FF 47.0 & tabs that have audio playing have a speaker icon on them that you can click on to mute that tab. Just wanted to let it be known that there is now a FF option available for this issue. TY.
Thanks for the update, Mukphly!