Google believes sites should be held accountable for the content they post

Feb 12, 2014 13:00 GMT  ·  By

Google won’t introduce a “mute tab” button on Chrome because it doesn’t want a browser to have the ability to police content.

Recently, the Internet giant has introduced several tab indicators to make sure that everyone knows which tabs make noise, which use your webcam or which cast content to your TV.

It wasn’t long after that people started wondering why Google wasn’t introducing a button to mute those annoying tabs.

Googler, developer and Chromium evangelist François Beaufort took the time to answer this question on his Google+ account.

“After much debate, we decided not to proceed with a tab mute control, as this crosses a very important line: If we provide Chrome controls for content, we’re implying that Chrome should take on a responsibility to police content,” he starts his message.

While he admits that users are rightfully upset about the misbehaving content, they should pressure websites to change this behavior rather than expect Google or any other browser developer to fix the problem.

“Also, some have pointed out that there is already a mute button to the right of the audio indicator (the ‘X’). In all seriousness, note that many web pages will register onClose() events to monitor when users leave their site. Thus, closing the tab will be a very strong signal to the web sites that their annoying ads are scaring all their users away,” Beaufort writes.

When it comes to behaving content, Google considers that it’s reasonable for users to click on tabs and use the content’s media controls to stop playback, which would make a Chrome tab mute control redundant.

While Google won’t act upon this suggestion, Beaufort admits that the company is considering building a special API for the audio tabs, which would give extension developers some room to build tools for this particular purpose.