Till now we’ve seen Chrome and Edge displaying Media Control Overlays for YouTube Videos when media keys are pressed, Google Chrome now introduced “Global Media Controls UI” in Canary version 77 and it can be enabled and seen from the toolbar. The Global Media Controls (GMC), unlike to overlays neither require media keys usage nor disappear immediately, can be seen anytime when YouTube videos are playing by clicking toolbar icon.
We’ve covered Chromium browsers showing YouTube video info in an overlay, Microsoft worked with Google to bring this feature to Chromium on Windows. Behind the scenes, YouTube website via Media Session API provides metadata about video title, artist name, and company information to Chrome/Edge browser which then will be displayed in an overlay.
Today Google added a flag Chrome Canary to enable Global Media Controls UI on Windows, Mac, and Linux. If you enable this flag, a play icon will appear on the toolbar when media controllable sessions are active, clicking the icon displays media controls UI that shows Play/Pause, Previous, next controls along with video info as we mentioned above.
READ: Chrome Picture in Picture mode now shows Previous and Next Track buttons for Playlists on YouTube
To Enable Global Media Controls UI in Chrome browser right now
1. Update Chrome Canary to the latest version
2. Visit Chrome://flags
3. Search for “Global”, find “Global Media Controls” flag
4. Select “Enabled” and restart the browser.
Chrome says this flag “enables the Global Media Controls UI in the toolbar”
To test the feature
1. Visit YouTube
2. Play any video, a play icon will appear on the toolbar with Global Media Controls enabled, click on it to see media controls UI.
Note: The Canary version is very unstable today, crashed several times for us and we’ve covered Mac users receiving a white screen of death whey they launch Canary, we’ve provided a workaround, not sure how Canary is behaving now for them.
