One of the best things about Microsoft"s decision to revamp the Edge browser using the Chromium engine is that Microsoft and Google can both contribute to each other"s work, which will ultimately result in a better experience for all users, regardless of your browser of choice.
Case in point, just weeks after Google started testing a new feature called Global Media Controls (GMC) for Chrome, Microsoft has also started testing the same for its own browser. What do Global Media Controls do? Basically, they allow you to access playback information for any video/audio that is playing in any tab or window without having to navigate to that particular tab. It also gives you the option to play/pause media, or skip to the next/previous song/video. You can see an example of how it works in the video above.
The feature will not only allow you to be more productive and get things done more quickly, but it"ll also be a boon for quickly dealing with autoplay ads and video. Microsoft"s implementation also has a leg up on Google"s, by showing all media sessions, instead of just the most recently active one.
Earlier reports on Google"s implementation noted the buggy state of GMC so Microsoft isn"t making it easily available yet, even on its Canary testing stream. For now, you"ll have to manually enable the feature by opening the "Properties" pane for the Edge Canary app, and adding "--enable-features=GlobalMediaControls" to the target properties under the "Shortcut" tab. Hopefully, it"ll be officially pushed as part of Canary builds soon.
Source: Leopeva64-2 (Reddit) via Softpedia