Mute Tabs In Safari

Safari in El Capitan allows you to see which tabs are currently playing sound. You can click to mute or unmet individual tabs. You can also Control+click to see a list of tabs with sound. This is handy when a tab you are not viewing starts playing sound and you need to find it to turn the sound off.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On this episode let me show you how you can figure out which tab is playing sound in Safari and how you can easily mute it.
So one of the most annoying things when surfing the web and having multiple windows or tabs open is when some sound starts to play on a tab and you don't know which tab it's coming from. Sometimes this can be from little hidden videos or just some music playing in the background. 
But Safari and El Capitan takes care of this by giving you some indication of what's going on.
So I've got a YouTube video here in this tab and I'm going to start playing it. As soon as I do that you can see this little icon appears here, a little speaker icon. Also I get that here in the top.
Now when I switch to this window here you can see it changes to an empty speaker icon meaning that there is sound coming from the browser but it is not from this current tab and I can see this over here. Now this has an audio file in it and I'm going to start playing that. Now I'll be able to see I actually have speaker icons in both tabs. So I can tell there is sound coming from both.
Now if I want to stop the sound in another tab I can go over here and click on this and it mutes it. I don't jump to this tab. I don't have to go and review or anything. It just mutes that one and I only am left with the sound in this tab. I can unmute it. I can mute this one. So I can have the sound playing from a tab that I am not viewing. So you have music playing from a music player in another tab.
I also can use this icon up here to mute or unmute the current tab. 
So if I were to stop this from playing, you can see it goes away, and now I can actually use this to mute or unmute the sound in a different tab. So I'm actually using this to control a separate tab from this current one as opposed to now where it is playing and I'm using it to mute or unmute the current tab.
So you have a lot more control with just these little icons here in the top to be able to determine which tab is playing the sound and you can stop it from playing or just at least mute it from playing for the time being.
So like with a lot of other things on the Mac you can get more by Control clicking or a two finger tap on a trackpad or right clicking with the mouse on these icons here. It doesn't work up here but you can Control click here and I can mute this tab or unmute other tabs and I can also jump to any of the tabs with sounds. It tells me which tabs currently playing have tabs. So if you have fifteen tabs open and just can't see them all here you can quickly jump to one that's got sound and then from there you can see what's going on on the page. Whether you want to close it. What you want to do.

Comments: 5 Responses to “Mute Tabs In Safari”

Mark Scola

9 years ago

Hey Gary, great tip about Sound tabs!

carl hammel

Hi Gary. I find this feature useful, for instance, to mute the videos that seem to accompany every Macworld page these days. They are slow to load, even though I have a fast connection, and so I am usually well into reading the article and the tiny video is out of sight at the top of the page when the audio starts. My question: if I mute the audio, the video still continues and eats up resources, no?

Gary Rosenzweig

Yes, it uses resources. But don't worry about it unless it is causing you a problem. If so, then close those tabs completely I guess.

Radardude

I tried control + click and nothing about tabs playing sound. I am running El Capitan. Is there something I am missing? Am I correct in assuming that click is right or left mouse click?

Control+click and "right click" are the same things, unless you have changed from the default mouse options.
Muting only appears in that context menu if there is sound playing in that tab. You can watch the video closely to see what I am doing there.

Comments Closed.

Mute Tabs In Safari

Comments: 5 Responses to “Mute Tabs In Safari”

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