Google is testing new Play Control button in Chrome Taskbar

[harlan4096]

Google Chrome may soon get a Play Control button in the Chrome taskbar when a video or other media is playing in the browser.

May, because the feature is tested currently. While plenty of tests made it into final versions of Chrome, there is an even larger number of tests that never made it.

The feature landed in Chrome Canary recently; Chrome users may enable it and start using it. Since it is an experimental flag, bugs are to be expected, and this one is quite buggy at the time of writing.

First, the basics. You need to run the latest Chrome Canary release if you want to test it right now. It is now enabled by default so that you won't see the Play icon if you play a video on YouTube or elsewhere.

What you need to do is load chrome://flags/#global-media-controls in the Chrome address bar and set the flag Global Media Controls to enabled. Its description reads "Enables the Global Media Controls UI in the toolbar" and it is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux only. A restart of the browser completes the process.

A visit to YouTube and the playing of a video on the site shows the Play Control button in the Chrome main interface. That's also the time were you will run into bugs; Chrome may crash after a short while and there is nothing that you can do about it.

When you activate the Play Control with a click or tap, you will see a thumbnail of the video, the URL it is played on, and the title of it. Controls to pause or play the video, and to go back and forward in the video are provided as well.

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