It appears that Google will soon add a play button to its Chrome browser, as spotted by ZDnetand Techdows. The button will live on Chromes toolbar, and will allow users to play or pause a video or music thats playing in a tab.
The feature is called Global Media Controls, and its currently being tested on Chromes Development browser, Canary. Once its enabled, the feature appears next to the URL field, and will highlight what is playing, even if its on a different tab.
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If you have the Canary browser and want to test it out for yourself, you can go to its experiments page, chrome://flags/, and search for “Global Media Controls.” When the result pops up, you can then enable it. After relaunching the browser, youll see a tiny play button next to the URL field. Once youre listening to a song or video, the feature will allow you to skip forward or back, pause, or play the file. Testing it out myself, it works with video sites like YouTube and Vimeo, as well as Apples podcast pages and Spotify, although if you have multiple tabs that are playing something (say, if a page starts autoplaying a video), itll only pull up the original.
Its not clear when the button will be live for the main Chrome browser yet, but it does appear to be a useful feature. Google has introduced a couple of helpful features along these lines in the past — an
