Google Chrome receives several improvements to Global Media Controls

At the beginning of the last year, Google rolled out new global media controls (GMC) for its browser, allowing users to manage media playback from a single place. Since then, the company has been actively improving that part of the browser. In addition to the new progress bar for GMC, Google will bring even more enhancements to that feature.

Recently, Google made several changes to the media controls UI. These changes are available to developers and soon will appear in Chromium-based browsers. Here what is new.

First, a browser will now better handle the media stream artwork. Currently, Chrome crops the artwork if it does not fit into a square area. The updated version shrinks down the image and fills the rest of the square with the primary color. If there is no artwork, the browser uses the sit favicon or displays a blank square placeholder.

Second, the global media control UI will now show the list of available output devices, for example, Chromecast, headphones, etc.

Also, users will get new volume controls.

Finally, global media controls buttons received a subtle redesign.

GMC is now available in Chrome, but there is no information about when Google plans to update its browser with the latest version of media controls. You can expect these improvements to appear first in the Canary channel and later move on to more stable builds.

As for Microsoft Edge, the Redmond software giant usually adopts new features in Chromium relatively quickly and actively contributes to the development of this project. Although available in Edge for quite a long time, global media controls still require turning on one of the experimental flags. You can learn how to turn on global media controls in Microsoft Edge in a dedicated article.

Source: Leopeva64.

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