Thanks for filing the issue!

This issue seems to be similar to Issue:  858967 , hence merging into it and marking it as Duplicate.
Note: Feel free to Un-Dupe it if not the case.

Thanks!

I don't think this should be merged. As the issue that it is being merged with is a feature request.
This is a functionality degredation. 
Where it was working and is now no longer working.

If it was working before, you had an internal flag enabled to activate this feature.  The flag has been removed, since the UX leads decided not to proceed with this (a year and a half ago or so... we only now finally removed the flag).

Ahh I see, thank you for the explanation. 

 Issue 899557  has been merged into this issue.

Is there a feedback thread for the removal of this feature? I've always been using it, so much more convenient than right clicking and finding Mute Site/Tab. Please consider adding it back, or making it easier to mute site/tab by adding a keyboard shortcut.

 Issue 912855  has been merged into this issue.

Are there any plans to bring it back? It's available on the major web browsers.

Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/mute-sound-firefox-tabs

Safari: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/safari/mute-audio-in-tabs-ibrwae910b47/mac

I can't speak to future plans.  The availability in other browsers was considered by the UI leads at the time they made the call not to proceed with this.

Is this really a bug and not regression as it worked previousl albiet via internal flag?  

My recommendation is to keep mute site functionality but access it via modifier keys such as shift clicking the speaker icon to toggle site mute and normal click with no modifier for default expected behavior

Flags are not intended to be enabled by users and are not considered supported features.  Basically, from our perspective, Chrome never shipped this functionality.

Understandable, however from the average end user perspective, when they
google how to make it happen, and enable the functionality in the software
they already have installed,  that's a feature. Such as the software
supports the functionality regardless if it is actually featured or not.
There shouldn't even be a question as to whether or not the team should
reimplement and feature the tab muting. Can anyone on the dev team explain
an opposing reason as to not include the already programmed functionality?

On Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 11:32 AM pkast… via monorail <
monorail+v2.2899342933@chromium.org wrote:

What will it take to convince the team to (re-)implement this? It seems like once something is removed it will be practically impossible to bring it back. There are numerous posts on forums, Reddit, etc. of users expressing their frustration and opposition to this particular change.

@14: Yep, it's been explained in e.g. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=360372#c78 , https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/9vn3jh/tab_audio_muting_ui_on_canary/e9e3gfr , https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/9mrm8x/can_no_longer_mute_tab_with_click/e7vct9l/ , https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/a5aqin/can_no_longer_click_the_speaker_on_a_tab_to_mute/ebljeby .

@15: The leadership position as I understand it is that we'd like to first implement everything we can to address the use cases that lead to manual tab muting, but without requiring users to configure or click things.  If after that the remaining functionality (per-site mute controls, extension APIs) are still insufficient, we can reconsider what use cases are not well-served.

What changes people's minds is use cases that are poorly addressed by all current and proposed solutions, but well-addressed by the desired feature.  Increasing the volume of opposition to a decision is rarely effective, for a variety of reasons.

FWIW, after I turned off the flag, I found that I no longer need it very often; I "mute site" on truly awful sites, but otherwise it took a few days to adapt to not having this and I was mostly OK.  System mute and in-content audio and playback controls are generally sufficient for me (moreso than several years ago).

FWIW, after chrome removed the flag I have needed it so much that I have moved to Firefox.

I think the comments in the thread you link summarizes the need for this control to be restored:
https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/a5aqin/can_no_longer_click_the_speaker_on_a_tab_to_mute/ebljeby

Someone needs to remind the leads that when designing new features that 'perfect is the enemy of good'. The fact that a user wants and needs to click a single button to manually control an expected feature seems lost to them.

I require and want the ability to mute tabs from the speaker UI control. Radical idea it seems...