11 thoughts on “We want Tab Muting Back”

  2. Chrome wants to be the browser for the ~~idiots~~ masses. They are going for mass market, ~~dumb~~ simple. lowest common denominator.

    I figured this out when I read their bug reporting thread on removing the ‘x’ to close a tab:
    https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=50913

    Somewhere I also read an article or something that basically summed up google/chrome development philosophy. They don’t want to spend any time/energy working on a feature that is used by a small portion of the population. So if their user feedback says <20% of people use tab muting, they will just get rid of it.

    In some ways this makes sense - they can focus on stability, speed, and core functionality that affects every user.

    But IMO it goes against what a lot of people in the open-source community liked - the ability to tweak and customize their own experience.

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  3. I’ve been wondering why they’d pull a feature that is so benign and widely used. The only conclusion I could come up with was that it was being used to mute ads too conveniently.

    I use the tab muting feature too often to keep using chrome, especially if I have to put up with the design downgrade they forced on users this patch. Thusly, I’ve turned to Firefox again. It has been an adjustment, but I’m getting used to the differences again.

    I’m hoping enough of their userbase falls off with this 71 update, that they realize it was a mistake and rectify it.

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  7. “And only now are the developers worrying about” — untrue. The decision to remove this flag was made a year and a half ago which is why the feature did not ship. Behaviors controlled by flags are not considered shipped, are not supported, can (and will) be removed at any time, and shouldn’t be enabled by end users. The flags are for developer and debugging use only. This is why every time someone on these forums says something like “oh, I don’t like this decision, luckily you can reverse it with this flag” we devs ask people not to do that — because the flag will go away, so if you have a problem, we need to fix it in the real product.

    The fact that the flag didn’t get removed immediately after the decision was made not to ship was because there were higher priorities the team was working on. We’ve now spun up some tooling to help us remove flags more quickly in the future in such cases (and I imagine further improvements are still to come there).

    Posting that you want this flag back on here is not an effective way of asking for change. The effective way to achieve change is to use “Report an issue” in the Chrome Help menu, and say what specific use cases don’t work well with the default behavior. Do not mandate a particular solution; don’t ask for a clickable tab mute button. Say what your problems are and leave the appropriate solution in the team’s hands. Note that “I don’t like it” is not very compelling as a problem.

    Here’s an example of what a good feedback report would look like:

    “On , ads play with irritating audio and lack pause or mute controls. The site also hosts videos that I want to watch, so simply leaving the site muted all the time isn’t an option. While the context menu option in the tabstrip to mute and unmute the site exists, it’s fairly cumbersome to toggle repeatedly, and hard to discover (I didn’t know it existed until I read about it online). In Firefox, I can tackle this use case by clicking the speaker icon in the tab. Chrome lacks a similarly accessible mechanism.”

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  11. I HATE that this flag was removed. I get that it was not a “shipped” feature. I get that maybe not many people used it (see previous get as to why). But I used tab mute so many times every day! I hate that it was never an official feature.

    Like someone else said…Even Edge and Firefox have this feature. I dont want to have to right-click, scan a menu, and hit mute site. I want to just mute the tab by clicking the icon. Can’t be too much to as, right?

    There are some addons, but none that do the same thing that I have found.

    Please bring this as a shipped feature.

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