rseiler said:

Things have changed as of v71, inexplicably:

Peter Kasting explained in Reddit the reasons for this:

"The official reason is a combination of a large number of factors, but primarily that this is a symptom band-aid that doesn't address the underlying problems that lead to people wanting to mute tabs, and we should be spending our time addressing those problems. Contributing factors include potential dataloss risk, code complexity, behavioral complexity, and confusing interactions with mute-whole-site capabilities that the general userbase finds more compelling.

The functionality of muting an individual tab still remains accessible to extensions, which can mute tabs on-demand or automatically in response to heuristics; the intent is that extension developers provide options here beyond what are built in"


"Clickable tab mute was used by a tiny sliver of the userbase, in part because it was never a shipped feature. It was the absolute opposite of "widely used". Do keep in mind that r/chrome is highly nonrepresentative of the general userbase.

As to why this was pulled, the rationale has been posted repeatedly, and it has nothing to do with muting ads, but I can't stop you from choosing to believe whatever you want. I can say that as the person who argued for shipping this feature by default and lost, I was involved in the discussions with the actual decision-makers, so my claims about why this was not shipped are firsthand"



Besides, this feature was never officially implemented in Chrome, it could only be enabled using a flag and we have to keep this in mind:

P. Kasting: "Flags aren't options. Flags are for developer debugging only. End users are not supposed to enabled them, and can only even access them at all because sometimes we need to get a user to test something in the field. The only reason we have a flags page at all is because that's the only way to toggle the underlying debugging options on Chrome OS. We've made several moves over the years to try and make "don't touch these" clearer, but they haven't worked. People just post things on the internet about enable this flag and it makes everything better, and then when we remove it, they get angry."

Edwin said:

It seems they've abandoned the Tab Audio Muting experiment, for whatever reason, and are focusing on a new experiment - Manage audio focus across tabs...
where audio/media from a previous tab is auto-muted, in the background, when opening another...
You have to enable the experiment, though

That actually sounds like a very nice idea ... that should've been implemented in Chrome a long time ago. What took so long?
But removing the clickable sound icon to Mute/Unmute tabs is a downgrade and is going towards a negative direction. Very inconvenient that I have to now Right Click > Mute on the tab. It was easier and more efficient by using the left click instead. Google employees had a brain glitch. Hopefully they can fix the brain glitch so we can get this option back again.

onlytanmoy said:

I understand the flag has been removed now with v71. Thought of clarifying something- when i right-click on a tab (say playing YT video) and select 'mute site', the mute functionality works but not on clicking the volume icon on the tab, is it how it works now?

That is correct.