Mozilla recently released Firefox 81 with Credit Card auto-fill, a new Alpenglow theme, a new UI for PDF Viewer, PDF form filling, and other features and improvements. The update has also brought support for hardware media keys which allows controlling audio and video with the keyboard. If you don’t like the Media Controls feature that displays dated Overlay with Volume and buttons to manage playback, you can disable it easily in Firefox.
What you should know:
- Firefox 81 was released with multimedia keys support for the Keyboard
- Shows an overlay when you press media keys such as Stop and Play/pause.
- The overlay also appears on Windows lock screen
- Virtual control interface can now also be seen in Chrome, Edge and Vivaldi, and other Chromium browsers
The trouble with hardware media keys or Media Controls
The feature first implemented in Chrome has reportedly interfered with other apps such as Spotify and iTunes.
If you are not willing to close other apps that are utilizing media keys, you may want to close Chrome or deactivate the feature itself in the browser.
Since Chrome and other browsers don’t offer a setting to control the media controls, you need to visit the chrome://flags page and disable the “Hardware media key handling” flag, and need to restart the browser to turn off the feature.
Now, Firefox has received this feature.
There is no difference in the way the user reacts.
Currently, users are wanting to disable the dialog box that is triggered with media keys/
Like Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers, Firefox too doesn’t offer a setting in its browser User interface to manage Media Control. You need to dig into about: the config and toggle the hidden pref to turn that off.
If you’re willing to do that, follow the instructions given below.
Disable the Media Controls in Firefox
- Launch Firefox
- Visit about:config
- Click “Accept the Risk and continue“
- Search for “media.
hardwaremediakeys. enabled” and click on the toggle icon to change its pref value to false. 
media.hardwaremediakeys.enabled pref - Restart the Firefox browser.
Do you like Firefox’s Media Control feature aka media controls? Let us know in the comments below.
Summary: In this article, we’ve covered how to disable or turn off Hardware media keys or media controls in the Firefox browser.
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Media Player Hotkeys: Control Various Media Players from One Global Hotkeys Set
Thanks, been looking for a week or more. Works wonders
Thank you! This “feature” was a real pain when playing music while browsing.