Google Chrome Can Now Identify Your Most Annoying Tabs

What's This?

By Adario Strange2014-01-14 22:23:22 UTC

An new feature in Chrome that first surfaced back in November has finally emerged from beta testing and is now available to all.

The new feature adds a set of icons to your Chrome tabs that help you track down a particularly annoying web page that may be buried in layers of tabbed pages.

For example, if a buried web page suddenly begins playing audio from auto-play advertisement, now instead of furiously hunting for the offending page inside the stack, you can just look for the tab displaying the speaker icon.

Similarly, you can now track down buried web pages that happen to be using your webcam or sending video to your television via a red dot icon or blue square icon respectively.

However, when we tested the new functionality, we found that live video feeds from sites like Justin.tv and Ustream show up as audio icons rather than differentiating from pages playing purely audio streams on sites like Grooveshark and Spotify. But at least you can spot them from the pack.

Google’s update also includes new enhancements that deliver warnings before you inadvertently download malware.

The new version of the Chrome browser is available download here.

BONUS: Google+ Chrome Extensions: 5 More Handy Tools