SUMMARY The individual mute buttons on Task Manager icons is very nice, but by necessity has to be large enough to be easy to click by mistake. This can be frustrating when trying to bring your background meeting to the foreground to unmute. My proposal is to, on-hover, have the mute button float in a bubble above the task icon. The bubble can also dynamically split for a mic mute button if the application is recording, as well as a play/pause button, which would be very handy and improve ergonomics.
This would not work, because there is already a popup showing the windows associated with a task. When that task is playing audio, there is also a mute button in that popup already. It is also possible to disable the interactivity of the mute button in the Task Manager settings so it becomes an indicator only, or disable it altogether.