Smart Tab Mute

Picture the following situation: you’re listing to some chill music in your browser, and someone sends you a video link. Upon opening the link in question the video starts playing and, to your annoyance, the volume discrepancy between the two audio sources (the tab with music and the one with the video’s audio) is so big that you’re forced to close one as fast as possible.

If you often find yourself in this particular situation, then you’ll sure like what Smart Tab Mute has to offer. In just a few words, Smart Tab Mute is a Google Chrome extension (also available for Firefox) that automatically mutes all other tabs sound sources upon opening a new tab that requires audio.

Even more conveniently, closing the new tab will automatically unmute the initial tab, making the whole process extremely smooth and improving the whole browser experience in this regard.

Just like most other extensions of this sort, it can be easily installed from the Chrome Web Store with little to no effort on your part. Once installed, the extension makes its presence known via an icon located in the typical place right next to Chrome’s address bar.

The extension is extremely simple, so you should not expect much in terms of user interaction. Considering there are no settings or other options for you to fiddle with, you can just as well hide the extension in the Chrome menu.

Despite its extreme simplicity, Smart Tab Mute does allow you to exclude various URLs. From the Options menu (general extension Options menu), you can include URLs that will be automatically ignored by the extension. From the same small menu, you can also either enable or disable the “Unmute last tab” feature.

While it may not offer much in terms of looks or versatility, Start Tab Mute does its singular job right, and there’s really nothing we can reproach. If you often find yourself suffering from the effects of intertwining sounds from various tabs with sound in your Chrome browser, then you should definitely give this little tool a chance.