Opera Software, can you please remove the illogical mute button from the tab please ? Why illogical ? because like previous user wrote one miss-clicks alot, and when you have pinned tabs the mute button covers more than half of each tiny pinned tab, making it super annoying and slow to drag tabs. For some like me, the contextual menu entry ("Mute Tab") is enough. There should exist a setting to enable/disable the button, for those that want a button. Why is the button forced down the throats of the rest of us ?

Exactly. It used to work when you disable the mute button in opera://flags. This was great, it was win-win because some people think this is a great idea. They are obviously wrong, but it's about user control at the end of the day.

I do not want media control buttons on a tab. That is completely illogical.

Regardless, I did log a bug for this and hopefully Opera will give it attention.

Problem area: Problem viewing or interacting with website
URL: opera://flag

Summary: Cannot disable mute button on tabs in Opera Developer 41.0.2323.0

Description:
The Chrome engine has flags which allow one to disable the annoying mute button that appears on browser tabs. The field in question is #enable-tab-audio-muting and it appears on the chrome://flags page.

Opera masks this flag and it is not possible to adjust this setting on opera:// flags.

This was available in the stable Opera editions. It may be that the chrome engine has been masked or some features have been disabled in the Developer editions for some good reason, but I feel that the standard chrome engine flags should not be masked by Opera. Extend them, sure, but don't modify them or override them or completely remove them.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open opera://flags
2. Search for 'mute'.
3. There is no Tab audio muting UI control flag, only zuul.

Actual result:
The annoying mute button still appears on tabs.

Expected result:
The mute button should not appear on tabs. Please unbreak or unmask this chrome engine feature so users can have more control over their browser.

The bug thread is here:

DNAWIZ-5650

Breaking functionality is a bug.

One thought might be to move it to a right click context menu. make "mute tab" the first item on the list if there's sound coming from the tab.

This is actually there, so all that is arguably needed is an indication of which tab is making the noise.

But there's no more ways to get rid of the mute button that sits on the tab.

It still works in Chrome, thankfully.

Breaking functionality is a bug.

Mute tabs work as it should. The fact that Chrome, a different browser, has a different flag doesn't mean that Opera or any other browser that does not offer the same experiment are breaking any functionality.
Flags are not settings. Flags are experiments that developers can turn on and off at any time.

You can't disable the mute button. You could do this before. I would like to still be able to disable this annoying mute button, especially since the right click context menu makes it redundant.

Note that I am not requesting the complete removal of this annoying mute button that somehow made it onto a browser tab, of all places. I am merely echoing the request made by other users for user choice in the matter. I do understand that some people may very well want to click on their tabs in order to mute media that is running on the page, despite there not being a rational use case for such a scenario. The idea behind configuration settings is a win-win scenario.

As an user, I merely want to be able to disable this annoyance, and any other feature that some developer thought was a great idea but that annoys the living crap out of me. Your other others feel the same, considering I did not start this thread and it was an annoyance long before it annoyed me, and that some users do want to use it. A configuration setting makes it possible for both of us to use Opera and enjoy it.

I am not interested in getting semantic about what constitutes a bug or not, I merely want to enjoy the same functionality that Opera had previously offered me and which is no longer working. What is more is it won't take anything away from those who want a mute tab button.

All features should enjoy the same standard: Use them if you want, disable them if you do not want to use them. In my view, a feature should not leave the experimental stage under any circumstances, until the user configuration options for such a feature are completed too. Which includes the option of disabling it entirely. Just like you can disable ad blocking, battery saver and the proxy entirely if you do not wish to use them.

I would love the option of not using this annoying mute button, but I do not have such a choice. You see, the button is on top of the tab, and as the person who started this thread told you already, if you click on a tab to switch, then you mute that tab.

This is contradictory to user expection, and it is in fact a bug.

Please bring back this option. I am using Opera Developer 41.0 and I can no longer remove the incredibly illogical and annoying mute button from tabs.

There used to be a flag under opera flags where I could disable this annoyance, but now this seems to have been removed.

I can also not find a setting under the ordinary Alt+P settings to get rid of this silly gremlin.

Why put a mute button on there and not a play button, a stop button, a playlist maker, an equaliser and an option to close the entire browser and run a Winamp skinl? Oh, right. Because Opera is a browser, not a media player. Do not fiddle with the media on tabs. Do what you do best and more importantly - the only reason why I am still using Opera rather than any other browser - do NOT remove configuration settings.

I want to be able to disable any featuritis symptoms you implement, and anything and everything that used to be configurable should always remain configurable.

I just hover my mouse cursor over the tab with the audio and I click. There is suddenly a mute button that mutes the tab.

On Chrome, the offending tabs always display the mute button. So I can see them and I don't click on them. Also, I can disable them, so even if I do click on them, they relay information, but they don't interfere with the media on the tab.

The sides are switched, on Chrome they are on the right hand side. On Opera, they appear on the left hand side of the tab. Not that this matters, but I'm just assuming someone went through a lot of trouble to make things on Opera different than what they already get with the Chrome engine.

I just saw now that I can install older versions of Opera from the FTP site. I would prefer using the latest and greatest versions, but if that is what it takes, I recall that there was an Opera version without the featuritis that just did its job. Even the developer versions were working. I'll see what that version was and then just disable updates so I can disable this mute button.

I prevent media from autostarting, so I have no need for a mute button.

That solves a different problem, though. My use case is there is already media playing on a tab. I often put a Youtube video on or a podcast or something to listen to the audio while I do something else. Then, when I switch back to the tab with media playing on it by clicking on it, the audio gets muted with a magic mute button that appears out of nowhere.

There used to be a way to disable this magic mute button. Chrome still has this option, which is why I'm currently using Chrome as my main browser. I have to dig in the flags section and disable the enable-tab-audio-muting flag, but it does work to keep my audio going.

This exact flag setting used to be available in Opera, and I would just like the option back.

Wow, thanks. I was unaware of that FTP site. Now I can disable autoupdate and get an older version of Opera where there is no mute button on the tabs.

I'm still struggling to understand why it is desirable to have a mute button on a tab.

If you have for example a video playing on Facebook and Youtube on separate tabs, it makes sense to notify the user of the tabs that have audio playing. If they ant to stop that audio, they can right click and mute the tab.

My request is merely to keep everyone happy: Do you want to use the mute button? Fine. Use it. Do you struggle to make sense of a mute button? Then just disable it, which is something that is allowed by the underlying chrome engine.

So besides bringing this to the attention in as far as I am aware is the proper way to do it, what else can I do to request that user configuration settings that were once there and working return to Opera again?

Too bad as I really want to use Opera as my main browser but I can't because the mute button keeps muting content when I don't want it to be muted.

I still do not have the option to disable the mute button on a tab in Opera 45.

Perhaps you have missed the use case I sketched out above, which I specifically bothered with to conform to the requirements listed elsewhere on the forum as to how new features should be brought to the attention of Opera developers.

I agree that a company cant' simply add everything its users ask, but it is worth noting that users who come to Opera have a wide range of other options. What sets Opera apart from the other options? To me, it is not different features. I specifically switched to Opera from Firefox because Firefox also took away configuration settings, which I was using at the time.

Again, someone developed the options away. There was an option to remove the mute tab button. Perhaps it was not intended, but it worked, and it stopped working at some point in a developer version. I was enjoying the developer previews, despite them not always being ready for release. I imagine that the purpose of the developer previews is to make your lives easier, since users can bring things to your attention before you roll out featuritis in official releases.

I maintain that users should have options and there's no conceivable reason why someone would develop away a configuration setting.

This issue was first identified in the developer preview of Opera. I made Opera aware of it then, and noted that it isn't present in the official release. I asked nicely, please don't break your browser further and don't let this slip into the official stream.

Note that this is an issue to your users. You wax lyrical over whether it is a bug or not at your own peril.

It doesn't matter. The issue is 100% reproducible, I have made my case for why this should be an option that gives user control over the behaviour of their own browsers.

Now you want to get petty over what is a bug, and what is not. Please stick to the topic, namely a feature/bug that users want resolved, and let's not get philosophical about your understanding of what constitutes a bug.

Software not behaving according to user expectation is a bug. You may disagree about that, but you are still stuck with a browser that isn't behaving according to user expectation.