You have twenty tabs open. You're working in one of them. Suddenly — audio starts playing from somewhere. A video ad. An auto-playing news clip. A tab you opened an hour ago that decided now is the time to start making noise. You scramble to find which tab it is, clicking through them one by one.
Auto-playing audio in browser tabs is one of the most annoying experiences on any computer, and it's worse on Mac because macOS has no way to mute a specific app (let alone a specific tab) without muting everything.
Disable autoplay in Safari
Safari has the best built-in autoplay controls of any browser:
- Open Safari → Settings (⌘,) → Websites tab
- Select "Auto-Play" in the left sidebar
- Set the default at the bottom to "Never Auto-Play" or "Stop Media with Sound"
"Stop Media with Sound" is the best option — it blocks videos that auto-play with audio but allows muted auto-play (which many sites use for decorative background videos). "Never Auto-Play" blocks everything.
You can also configure per-site settings in this same panel if you want to allow autoplay on specific sites like YouTube or Netflix.
Disable autoplay in Chrome
Chrome's autoplay controls are less granular:
- Go to
chrome://settings/content/sound - Toggle "Sites can play sound" to determine the default behavior
- Add specific sites to the "Mute" list to permanently silence them
Chrome also lets you mute individual tabs: right-click a tab → "Mute site." This mutes all audio from that site until you unmute it.
Mute a tab quickly
Both Safari and Chrome show a speaker icon on tabs that are producing audio. In Safari, click the speaker icon in the tab to mute it. In Chrome, right-click the tab and select "Mute site."
This works for one tab at a time, but if you have multiple noisy tabs, you're clicking through them one by one.
The broader problem: browser audio vs. everything else
Even with autoplay disabled and tabs muted, you might still want to control how loud your browser is relative to other apps. Maybe you're watching a YouTube tutorial while on a Zoom call — you want the tutorial at 30% and Zoom at 100%. Or you're playing background music in a browser tab and it's competing with your Spotify.
macOS treats the entire browser as one app with one volume. You can't make one tab quieter than another at the system level. But you can make the entire browser quieter than other apps.
SoundDial gives your browser its own volume slider, independent from every other app. Lower Safari to 30% while keeping Zoom at 100%. Mute Chrome entirely while keeping Spotify playing. One click.
This is the fastest way to handle a surprise auto-playing tab: instead of hunting for which tab is making noise, click SoundDial in the menu bar and mute the browser. Everything else keeps playing. When you've found and closed the offending tab, unmute the browser and its volume returns to where it was.
Get SoundDial on the Mac App Store — €14.99 one-time purchase, no subscription, macOS 14.2+.