Chrome Is Getting Support for Media Keys

Google is adding a much-needed feature to its Chrome browser soon. The browser is soon going to work with your media keys, allowing you to control the playback of music/video across different sites very easily.

With Chrome 73, Google plans to introduce support for hardware media keys — this means you will be able to play/pause, and play the next/previous track using the playback keys on your keyboard or device itself. The feature will be initially available on Windows, macOS, and Chrome OS devices, but support for Linux is expected later.

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Chrome getting support for media keys is a really nice improvement, at least for me. I (and probably many others) happen to listen to a lot of songs on sites like SoundCloud and sometimes YouTube, and being unable to easily play/pause the music with a single key is a massive pain. But with Chrome 73, that will no longer be the case as you will just be able to hit the media keys on your keyboard.

Chrome 73 should be available sometime next month, so make sure to keep an eye out for that.

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Conversation 4 comments

  • Thomas Parkison

    08 February, 2019 - 1:54 pm

    <p>About time!</p>

  • warren

    09 February, 2019 - 2:43 pm

    <p>This facility has been in Chrome for Android for a couple of years. Nice to see it finally coming to the desktop version.</p><p><br></p><p>What would be really nice is if Apple would implement the draft standard in Safari and get it hooked up to the Touch Bar… i.e. when a web application uses the MediaSession API, show the play/pause/next/previous buttons. It'd make the Touch Bar a lot more useful.</p><p><br></p><p><br></p>

  • ldsands

    10 February, 2019 - 9:00 am

    <p>I hope this doesn't work like the media keys they have for google play music. It'll hijack the media keys for the whole system and then you can't use them anywhere else. I had to uninstall the google play music app (within chrome) as a result.</p>

    • IanYates82

      Premium Member
      10 February, 2019 - 8:26 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#403899">In reply to ldsands:</a></em></blockquote><p>I was just wondering about this. Does it require window focus to operate, or did it take over the functionality of the keys.</p><p>It makes a bit more sense for a music app to take these over than a generic browser at least, although it's still a bit yuck that you had to uninstall it just to get the keys back.</p>

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