Chrome 79 was launched just over a week ago. This new version included news such as protection against phishing in real time, warn you if your passwords are leaked on the network, mark websites with TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 as unsecured, or reduce memory consumption. Now, they have released a new multimedia control panel for videos that will make it easier to control videos and music that we are playing in the background.
Global media controls: the new panel for videos and songs from Chrome 79
To whom it has not happened that you have dozens of tabs open, and you are listening to YouTube music in one of them. In the case of wanting to pause the song or switch to another, you had to manually search for the tab. That ends today, because when we are playing a video or song, we will now have a new button just to the left of our Chrome profile picture.
If we click on that button, a small window is displayed in which we can go back to the previous song, move backwards, pause, move forward, or switch to the next song.
The option of moving forward or backward jumps of 5 seconds , just as if we were giving it with the arrow keys. In order for the buttons to skip song on YouTube, it is necessary to be within a playlist. In the upper right corner we also see the close icon to close the video tab without having to go to it.
The color and background of the popup window adapts to the content to be able to identify it more easily, along with displaying thumbnails if the video has them, as it is in the case of YouTube. In addition, we will open as many pop-ups as videos or multimedia content we have open, so we can control all the videos that we have open from the same site.
We can control several videos at once
The icon will only appear when we have a tab open where there is multimedia content. If we have nothing open, the button will not be present.
At the moment we have verified that it works with YouTube and SoundCloud , but it also works if we play an MP3 in the browser or with any content that has sound. If the content is muted, it will not appear in the drop-down multimedia menu.
The new function, called Global media controls , could be activated through its flag, but with the latest Chrome update it has already reached the stable version of the browser and we can enjoy it all.
At the moment it is reaching all users who upgrade to Chrome 79.0.3945.88 , and if it still does not arrive after you have updated, you can manually go to chrome: // flags / # global-media-controls and force its activation by giving Enabled . You restart your browser, and it should be working when you play a video.
Undoubtedly, one of the best features that Chrome has added to usability level in recent years, as it will save time on a daily basis when making changes to the content we are playing.
