How to disable Firefox’s Media Controls feature

Mozilla recently released Firefox 81 with Credit Card auto-fill, new Alpenglow theme, 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 Control feature that displays dated Overlay with Volume and buttons to manage playback, you can disable it easily.

What you should know:

Firefox 81 released with multimedia keys support for Keyboard
Shows an overlay when you press media keys such as Stop and Play/pause.
The overlay also appears on Windows 10 lock screen
Virtual control interface can now also be seen in Chrome, Edge and Vivaldi, and other Chromium browsers

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 triggered with media keys/

Like Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers, Firefox too doesn’t offer a setting in its UI to manage Media Control. You need to dig into about:config and toggle the hidden pref for that.

If you’re willing to do that, follow the instructions given below.

Disable Media Control feature 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.