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Chrome 32 tells noisy tabs to shut up

The latest Chrome beta will let you know which tab is making all that noise so you can close it immediately.

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Lexy Savvides Principal Video Producer
Lexy is an on-air presenter and award-winning producer who covers consumer tech, including the latest smartphones, wearables and emerging trends like assistive robotics. She's won two Gold Telly Awards for her video series Beta Test. Prior to her career at CNET, she was a magazine editor, radio announcer and DJ. Lexy is based in San Francisco.
Expertise Wearables, smartwatches, mobile phones, photography, health tech, assistive robotics Credentials
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Lexy Savvides

Finally, Chrome will let you give noisy tabs the heave-ho.

(Credit: Google)

The latest Chrome beta will put an end to those frustrating moments spent scrounging around your hundred-odd tabs to find the one that's making all that racket.

Chrome 32, which is available for download here, will place an icon in the tab to indicate if the page is playing audio. The icon changes depending on the source: for example, streaming audio has a speaker icon in the tab and using a webcam has a record icon.

Silencing noisy tabs was first touted as an upcoming feature for Google's browser back in February.

The new beta also brings a few tweaks to the look and feel of the browser in Windows 8 Metro mode. Very similar to the look on a Chromebook, the beta now has an app launcher and multiple window support.

Google has also added a security feature to Chrome that automatically blocks suspected malware. This is in addition to its safe browsing mode that warns you before visiting suspicious pages or downloading malicious files.