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Silencing Noisy Web Pages
Q. I often listen to music when browsing the web on my Mac but get annoyed when Safari starts blaring an advertisement or some other video — especially in another browser tab. Can I turn off the audio for just the browser?
A. The most recent version of the Safari browser for OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) includes controls that let you quickly mute audio coming from any open tab in the program’s window. Look for a small sound icon on the right side of Safari’s address bar — the area of the window that Apple calls the Smart Search field because you can also use it to enter keywords, repeat previous searches or see a list of favorite websites.
If audio is playing somewhere on the active page in that particular browser tab, the sound icon is solid blue. Click the blue icon to mute the audio on that page. If you have multiple pages open and one of them is playing audio (but not on the page you are reading), the sound icon appears as a blue outline that you can click to mute all the other pages in your open tabs.
When your music listening is done and you actually want to hear the audio in the page you are viewing — but other tabs are making a racket with conflicting audio — hold down the Mac’s Option key and click the sound icon. This action should silence everything but the page you are viewing. You can also click and hold the sound icon to see a list of open pages that are playing sound.
Browser tabs for pages currently playing audio also display a small black version of the sound icon on the right side of the tab. Click the icon on the tab to mute the audio on that page, or click the icon again to unmute it. Other browsers, including Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, also silence a tab when you click the sound icon or right-click (or Control-click) the tab and choose the mute command.
Personal Tech invites questions about computer-based technology to techtip@nytimes.com. This column will answer questions of general interest, but letters cannot be answered individually.
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