Mute Individual Browser Tabs

How to Mute Individual Browser Tabs in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox

by Chris Hoffman 

Modern desktop web browsers—Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple Safari—all allow you to mute individual browser tabs in just a few clicks. Even Microsoft Edge allows you to mute browser tabs, although Microsoft could make this a lot easier.

This is useful if a tab starts playing music or video and you want to mute it temporarily. In most cases, it just takes a click or two. If you want something more robust that can automaticaly mute tabs for you, though, we have a separate guide for that.

Google Chrome

To mute a browser tab in Google Chrome, just right-click the tab and select “Mute Tab”. You’ll see a crossed out speaker icon appear to the left of the “x” button on the tab, informing you that the tab is muted.

Chrome shows a speaker icon on every tab playing audio, so it should be easy to find which tab you need to mute. Just look for the one with the speaker icon. You can even left-click the speaker icon to mute the tab, instead of right-clicking.

Right-clicking allows you preemptively mute a tab before it even starts making noise, though, if you’re concerned you’re about to visit a noisy web page.

Mozilla Firefox

To mute a browser tab in Firefox, right-click the tab and select “Mute Tab”. As in Chrome, you’ll see a crossed-out speaker icon appear to the left of the “x” button on the browser tab.

Like in Chrome, it’s easy to find which browser tabs are making noise—just look for the speaker icon. You can also preemptively mute a tab before it starts making noise. You can also simply left-click the speaker icon to toggle sound on and off for that tab.

Apple Safari

In Safari on a Mac, you can mute a tab in multiple different ways. While the current active tab is playing sound, a speaker icon will appear in Safari’s location bar. Click it to toggle sound on and off for the tab.

You can also right-click any tab and select “Mute Tab”, or just left-click the speaker icon that appears at the right side of the tab.

Microsoft Edge

Microsoft Edge also displays a speaker icon on browser tabs when that tab is playing sound. However, there’s no way to actually mute the tabs from within Edge.

There is a way to mute individual Edge browser tabs, however. To do so, right-click the speaker icon in the notification area at the bottom right corner of your screen and select “Open Volume Mixer”.

Scroll to the right in the Volume Mixer window and look for the Edge browser tab playing sound. Different browser tabs will appear separately here. Click the speaker icon below the name of the page to mute it.

To unmute the tab, you will need to either close and reopen the browser tab or return here and click the speaker icon once again.

Hopefully, Microsoft will one day add a more integrated tab-muting feature to Microsoft Edge. For now, this is the only option besides muting your PC or switching to another browser.