Google is working on bringing a tab mute button to its browser, similar to how Microsoft Edge allows its users to disable the sound on a web page by clicking a speaker button on the tab strip. Currently, the mute button is available behind an experimental flag in the Canary channel, which is off by default. Google wants to improve feature discoverability in Chrome by adding a special banner. It will let users know that they can mute a tab with a single click.
Category: Google Chrome
Chrome 98 is out with 27 security fixes and new color font format support
Google Chrome 98 has reached the stable branch. It is mostly a security update rather than major feature release. However, it is notable for adding support for COLRv1 Color Gradient vector fonts. The latter addresses font scaling issues and allows producing much smaller font files.
Chrome on Android will show a warning before closing all tabs
To make life easier for those who never close tabs in their browsers, Google introduced a "Close all tabs" button in Chrome on Android and iOS. It sits in a context menu you can invoke by pressing a button with three dots in the upper-right corner of the screen.
Google is again testing Tab Muting in the Chrome browser
A few years ago, Google was about to add the tab muting feature to Chrome. The implementation was very simple. To mute a tab, you could click the speaker icon next to the tab's title. The option didn't come to the stable branch, perhaps due to the addition of Global Media Controls. But now, Tab Muting has returned to Chrome.
Google is about to replace its controversial FLoC with Topics
As you may remember, recently Google introduced a new user tracking technology called FLoC as a replacement for classic cookies. The technology has been criticized by major browser vendors. Still, Mozilla, Vivaldi, Brave, and other browsers aren't going to implement FloC. So Google is here with a different solution called Topics API.
How to Enable the Screenshot Tool in Google Chrome
You can enable the Screenshot tool in Google Chrome. It will appear under the "Share" menu in the address bar. The tool allows capturing a user-defined area of the open website in the current tab.
The List of Chrome URLs for Internal Built-in Pages
Here's the list of internal Google Chrome URLs for built-in pages. These pages provide extra details on features and components available in the browser. Certain pages allow testing a variety of browser tools, enable hidden options, and even simulate web and app errors.
Google restored the option to remove default search engines
Google recently released an updated Chrome browser with one questionable change in settings. Users no longer can remove default (preinstalled) search engines, such as Google, Bing, Duckduckgo, and others. More importantly, the change is universal to all Chromium-based browsers, which means Edge, Opera, and other similar browsers received the same "upgrade."
Chrome 97 no longer allows removing default search engines
Google has silently rolled out a change to the its browser and the underlying Chromium project. Both apps do not allow removing the default search engines any longer starting in version 97. The change has already introduced in Chrome 97, and has affected other Chromium-based projects.
Chrome 97 is out, here are the changes
The holiday season caused a slight delay in the now-regular four week period between stable releases of Chromium and Microsoft Edge. Two months after the Chrome 96 release, Chrome 97 is now available in the stable channel.
