Back in August I spotted the return of this feature, well, the commit that restore this option was merged yesterday and today this option is already available in the Canary version:

Commit:

Enable tab muting behind a flag

This CL reimplements the tab muting feature that was previously removed in 2018. This implementation follows the original UX proposal of making the existing tab alert indicator into a clickable button but removes the hover and double click behavior.

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\"Tab audio muting\" flag.

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Tab muting.

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Tab muting.

Tab muting (GIF).

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Important!: The fact that this feature is already working in Canary doesn't guarantee that it will finally reach the stable version, in fact, according to the owner of the commit, Google will run an experiment to compare the use of the "Tab muting" feature (in the tabstrip) with the use of the Global media controls mute button, and after that experiment they'll decide if the appropriate place for the "Mute" button is in the Global media controls or in the tabstrip, these are some of the comments in the commit:

Our plan is to run an experiment to compare the usage of tab muting with the usage of the global media control to help determine whether users would actually use this feature and if so, if we should put the control in the tab strip or in the global media control.

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After multiple rounds of discussion we finally got approval from [email protected] to run an experiment for tab muting at 1% of Stable!

If I understand correctly, this means that at some point Google will enable this feature by default in 1% of Chrome installations (in the stable version), so if you are part of those users and want the "Mute" button to remain in the tabstrip, make sure you use that button a lot so that those metrics reach Google.

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ICYMI: Windows 11-style overlay scrollbars will soon begin testing in Chrome.

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