If you’re a web user, you know that it can be difficult to keep track of all the tabs open in your browser. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which tab is the active one, and sometimes you just want to close one of them. In Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge, there are three ways to mute individual tabs: by clicking on the tab’s icon in the top left corner of your screen, by pressing Ctrl+M (or Cmd+M on Mac), or by using the keyboard shortcut Cmd+F5 (or Cmd+F4 on Windows). Here’s how to do it in each browser: Chrome: Click on the tab’s icon in the top left corner of your screen. Safari: Press Ctrl+M (or Cmd+M on Mac). Firefox: Press F5 (or Cmd+F4 on Windows). Edge: Click on the three lines that run along the bottom of your screen and select “mute.”
Modern desktop web browsers—Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Microsoft Edge—all allow you to mute individual browser tabs in just a few clicks. Silencing an annoying tab that won’t stop playing audio is now two clicks away.
RELATED: How to Automatically Mute New Tabs in Chrome and Firefox
This feature is useful if a tab starts playing music or a 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 automatically mute tabs for you, though, we have a separate guide for that.
Mute Individual Browser Tabs in Google Chrome
To mute a browser tab in Google Chrome, right-click it and select “Mute Site.” This will mute all tabs from the site in the future.
To unmute them, right-click one of that site’s tabs and click “Unmute SIte.”
In older versions of Google Chrome, you could just click on the speaker icon that appears on a tab that is playing audio. You’d see a line through it, and the tab would be muted. Now, you have to use the context menu option instead.
Mute Individual Browser Tabs in 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.
Mute Individual Browser Tabs in Apple Safari
In Safari on a Mac, you can mute a tab in multiple different ways. While the currently 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 on the right side of the tab.
Mute Individual Browser Tabs in Microsoft Edge
Muting tabs in the old version of Microsoft Edge required you to adjust sound settings on Windows. Now that Edge is based on Google’s Chromium, you can mute tabs using the same process as Chrome on your Windows PC, Mac, Linux computer, or Chromebook.
As laid out above, start by opening a tab in Microsoft Edge. Next, right-click the tab and then select “Mute Tab” from the drop-down context menu. Music and sounds will no longer be audible.
If you ever want to re-enable audio on a certain tab, repeat the steps above to unmute a tab.
