How to Mute Everyone on Google Meet

The Google Meet comes with the basic functionality, but it has some shortcomings like any other decent video calling app. One example is the inability to natively mute all participants in a group call at the same time. You will find this functionality in other applications like Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Skype. What if you need to mute everyone’s audio during your Google Meet group video call? We will talk about the solution in this post.

Relax, you are not alone while battling this. Thousands of users like you are looking for ways to mute everyone in a Google Meet video. Without further ado, let’s go to the section below to find out how to turn off everyone in Google Meet.

Note: The workarounds listed below only apply to PC / Web users of Google Meet. You can’t use these tips on the Google Meet mobile app or a mobile browser.

1. Mute Browser tab

A brilliant workaround to deactivate all participants in Google Meet is to deactivate the tab that manages the meeting. Google rolled out the Mute Tab feature on Chrome in 2017 for this purpose – to mute the sound of websites that read annoying sound in the background. If you don’t have time to locate the audio source on the website, you can simply cut the entire tab.

Besides Chrome, other popular browsers like Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox also allow users to cut tabs. Since Google Meet does not have a native function to mute participants remotely, the function of the Mute tab is a brilliant improvisation.

Did you know: For web users, Google Meet video conferencing only works on Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge.

To turn off everyone’s audio on Google Meet, you need to take advantage of the functionality of the Mute tab in your browser. It’s a fairly simple thing to apply, but we’ll show you how to do it in Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge.

Disable everyone on Google Meet in Chrome

Step 1: Launch the Chrome browser and right-click the Meet tab.

2nd step: Select Mute Site.

This will mute all audio / sound from the active website in the tab until you turn it back on. Therefore, this will (indirectly) mute everyone in the Google Meet call.

To reactivate Google Meet, perhaps when you need to hear participants speak, you need to right-click the tab and select Activate Site.

One downside to Chrome’s site deactivation feature is that it mutes other tabs on the same site that supports the feature. Let’s say you have 3 YouTube tabs open. When you turn off one of the tabs, Chrome also removes the other two YouTube tabs.

Disable everyone on Google Meet in Firefox

The Mute tab function of the Mozilla Firefox browser can also be improvised to cut everyone on Google Meet. Follow the steps below to do so.

Step 1: Launch Mozilla Firefox on your computer and right-click the Google Meet tab.

2nd step: Select the Mute tab to mute the sound of Google Meet.

This should put a cross speaker icon on the tab. This indicates that the tab is disabled, just like everyone else in your Google Meet video call.

To re-enable Google Meet in Firefox, right-click the disabled tab and select Re-enable tab.

Disable everyone on Google Meet in Microsoft Edge

On Microsoft Edge, you can use the “Mute Tab” feature to mute everyone during a Google Meet call. You can also check out other Microsoft Edge tips and tricks with this. The process is fairly simple and straightforward; the steps are listed below.

Step 1: Launch Microsoft Edge in your browser and right-click the Google Meet tab.

2nd step: Select the Mute tab.

Pro tip: You can also use the keyboard shortcut “Ctrl + M” to deactivate a tab in Microsoft Edge.

2. Mute using browser extension

There are Chrome extensions that allow you to disable a tab in the browser. You will find these extensions useful if (i) you want to mute everyone when calling Google Meet, and (ii) you want to cut a particular tab without having to cut an entire website – on Chrome, it’s is to say.

We tested some of these extensions and found this “Mute tab (by trmcnvn)” stable. Over 50,000 people use it and gave it a 5-star rating on the Chrome Web Store.

Follow the steps below to learn how to use the extension to deactivate multiple Google Meet participants.

Step 1: Go to the extension page of the Mute tab and press the “Add to Chrome” button to install it on your browser.

Install the Mute tab (by trmcnvn)

2nd step: Press the Add Extension button at the prompt to confirm the installation.

Step 3: Now to deactivate a Google Meet tab and everyone, tap the speaker icon in the Chrome menu next to the address bar.

This will put a letter M under the speaker icon, which means that the tab has been disabled. To reactivate the tab, simply press the speaker icon (with an M below it).