One of the many features of Google Chrome is to visually indicate when audio is playing inside a tab. Muting that audio generally requires clicking on the tab, finding the source within the page, and stopping it, but thanks to an experimental option you can mute it with a single click, without leaving the tab you're working on.
Some pages have a habit of automatically playing audio. It doesn't even have to be an advertisement: several news sites have small video windows with previews that are played without user intervention. Even YouTube has incorporated an automatic playback system, chaining similar videos one after another. The point is that on more than one occasion we need silence, and hunting down the audio source inside a page to stop it can become annoying. As if that weren't enough, we must add the "auto-refresh", which has the potential to start the video again, turning the annoyance into something definitely irritating.
Fortunately, Google Chrome has a very practical internal feature. When there is an active audio source inside a tab, Chrome shows a small speaker next to its title. However, a simple visit to its experimental section (chrome://flags) will give us access to #enable-tab-audio-muting also known as "Enable user interface control to mute tab audio". One click to enable it, restarts the browser, and that's it. When you want to mute a tab's audio, a single click on the speaker is enough. I don't understand why Google has decided to keep this feature disabled by default, since it doesn't represent a drastic change in Chrome's operation, and it's quite useful.
As always, we recommend caution when browsing chrome://flags. In the same way as Firefox's about:config, a bad selection could knock out Google Chrome in a matter of seconds. You'll see several tempting functions there, mentioning things like extended hardware acceleration and optimized protocols for greater speed. The logical thing is to enable one, restart, and verify that Google Chrome doesn't blow up in your face.
