New Chrome beta helps you find that annoying tab that’s auto-playing music or ads

By Konrad Krawczyk Published November 12, 2013

We’ve all been there; you’re surfing the web, got 20 tabs or so open, and then it happens. Some annoying ad or song starts auto-playing out of nowhere and you can’t figure out where it’s coming from. You frantically cycle through all of your open tabs, but you just can’t determine which one is the culprit.

Disgusted, you close your entire browsing session and start anew, forced to re-open every site and service manually so you could identify the perpetrating page and make a mental note never to visit it again.

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Luckily, there’s a workaround to this problem. The newest version of Chrome beta will alert you whenever one of your browser tabs decides to go rogue and starts playing a song or an advertisement out of nowhere. The alerts will be visual. A red play icon will appear over the tab that’s playing random audio, a red dot will be pictured on tabs that make use of your webcam, and a TV icon will show up on tabs that are broadcasting stuff to your TV. This way, you can quickly ID which tab is doing what instead of freaking out and getting flustered.

If you want to grab the latest version of Chrome beta, just head here.

Konrad Krawczyk

Former Computing Editor

Konrad covers desktops, laptops, tablets, sports tech and subjects in between for Digital Trends. Prior to joining DT, he…

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