The public beta of El Capitan has an awesome feature that I’ve been wanting Apple to implement for approximately forever—we now can mute specific tabs within Safari, and it’s really easy to see which ones are pumping out audio in the first place. So if you visit pages that have videos that automatically play, for example, you can quickly find and nuke the offenders.
Here’s how it works: First, when a tab is playing audio, a speaker symbol will appear on it.
If you click that tiny little speaker, it’ll mute the tab, and you’ll see the symbol change to indicate it’s done so.
Additionally, if audio is playing from any of your tabs, Safari’s Omnibar will show that wherever you are.
You can click that icon instead to mute whichever tab is playing, so if you’ve got 87 million pages open, you won’t have to hunt through them all. No matter which way you stop the annoying sound, though, just click either speaker icon again to un-mute it. And you’ll be back to that sweet, sweet loud-ad-playing goodness. Yeah, “goodness.” That’s what to call it.