We’ve reported Global Media Controls added by Chromium team to Chrome browser lets you control media playback from the toolbar, the feature has been extended to all media sessions including that in incognito Windows now in Canary, which means, you can now peek at all videos playing in Chrome browser from the play button in the toolbar itself.
For the uninitiated, apart from Media Controls Overlay that appears for videos when you use media keys, Google started working on new Global Media Controls. After enabling the flag available with the same name, the UI appears when you click on Play toolbar button shows metadata about media (video) that is playing in Chrome browsers such as video thumbnail, track title, Previous, Play/Pause and Next buttons, company/ channel name in case of YouTube.
Now coming to the point, all media playing in tabs and windows can now be managed from Global Media Controls’ Play toolbar button. The interesting and debating thing is, the info about media playing in incognito windows will also be displayed in GMC and Chrome offers no visual indicator in the popup to show the difference between videos playing in normal and incognito modes. That may raise some privacy concerns as you may not want sensitive content in private browsing mode to show up in regular Chrome.
While the feature perfectly displays thumbnails for YouTube media, this is not the case for content played on video sharing sites such as Dailymotion or Metacafe. for instance, for Dailymotion videos, Chrome does show metadata except thumbnail in GMC UI.
Chromium Edge also supports Media Controls, but at the moment, you can only enable the feature by running Edge with below command line switch
--enable-features=GlobalMediaControls
The feature stopped working in Canary version of Edge.
Related articles:
Chrome and Edge display YouTube Videos info in an Overlay
Microsoft Chromium Edge: Global Media Controls, Clear browsing data on Exit, dark mode on Windows 7
Disable Media Control Overlays on Chrome and Edge browsers in Windows 10