Google Chrome might bring back the feature that lets you quickly mute a tab by clicking on the speaker icon. This feature was there in older versions of Chrome, but in September 2018, Google decided to remove it from the browser. But it looks like it might be making a comeback soon.

As spotted by Reddit user Leopeva64-2, a new patch has been uploaded to Chromium Gerrit, which suggests that Google could bring back the mute option to the Chrome browser on PC.

The description for the patch reads:

Revert "Remove --enable-tab-audio-muting"

This reverts commit 479cc17585a64910853e9949b053499ecbeca9a5.

Reason for revert: Bringing this back

Currently, Chrome lets you mute audio by right-clicking on a tab and selecting the “mute site” option from the context menu. Selecting this option will mute all tabs from that particular website until you unmute it. However, this option may not always be the ideal option as it completely disables the audio playing capability of websites.

Once this new mute option rolls out, users can simply click on the speaker icon that appears on a tab that's playing audio. Doing so will temporarily mute your current tab — instead of the whole website.

This feature is available in Microsoft's Edge browser, and you can see it in action in the GIF attached below (courtesy: Leopeva64-2)

Note that the new tab muting option is still under development and isn’t live in any Chrome release. As Leopeva64-2 notes, just because the patch has been uploaded to Chromium Gerrit doesn’t guarantee that it will make it to the Chrome browser — there’s always a chance that it may never get merged.

Meanwhile, a similar mute button has been added to Chrome's global media control along with a volume slider. Google has been working on these features since May, and they're now live in the latest version of Chrome Canary.