Tabs are something of a universal nightmare these days. No matter what we’re online for, we always seem to end up with lots of tabs open at the same time. As well as the huge amounts of memory all these tabs consume, often slowing our devices down to a crawl, they also make finding what we’re up to rather difficult.
Then, there is the even more annoying problem that having multiple tabs open throws at us. Videos and auto-play videos. How many times have you been doing something on your PC, with some random soundtrack playing away in the background? One of those tabs has a video playing and now you have to stop what you’re doing and seek out the tab in question so you can carry on distraction-free. The more tabs you have open the longer this will take. If you’ve ever experienced this problem, you’ll be glad to hear of a little test Google is currently running.
Google is looking to add a Play/Pause button to control video on your open tabs
A brand-new feature called Global Media Controls (GMC) has been spotted in one of the latest versions of the Google Chrome Canary build. Google uses Chrome Canary to test out new features that are late on in the development stage. This means that there is a very good chance that all Google Chrome users could see GMC on their version of Google Chrome sometime soon. So, what are Global Media Controls exactly?
At the moment, GMC looks like a play button and is found in the Google Chrome control bar in between the user icon and the Chrome plugin switches.
The button activates a small pop-up window, which then offers media controls for all audio and video media currently playing on Google Chrome.
This means that when you have some unknown audio track coming from one of your open tabs, all you have to do is click the GMC button and take control of the media. Impressively, according to the guys at ZDNet, the new feature should be able to control media being played in other Chrome windows and not just tabs.
Wrapping up
The new GMC controls will be added to the desktop versions of Google Chrome running on Windows, Mac, and Linux. However, there has been no word about Chrome OS. Unfortunately, however, there is also no official word about when the feature will land on the above platforms as it looks like Google still has some work to before the feature can be rolled out to all users. The GMC feature is still very buggy and often crashes. It is good to know that Google is working on solving such an annoying problem.
