A new feature that landed in Chrome 73 is support for hardware Media Keys. Whenever you press one of the play/pause/next/prev buttons on your keyboard, Chrome can now respond to this and will pause/play the actively playing element.
Whilst this might be a good addition for many, it doesn’t work me, as I’m constantly playing music through iTunes. With iTunes jingling around, here’s my experience:
- Open a site with a video and watch it play
- Hit (keyboard) pause button to pause iTunes
- Not iTunes but the video in the browser gets paused (😠)
- CMD+TAB into iTunes
- Hit (keyboard) pause button to pause iTunes
- Video in the browser resumes playback (with iTunes still playing too) (😡)
Looks like the browser (or macOS?) isn’t properly releasing/giving the focus, redirecting all media keys’ keystrokes to Chrome (instead of the focussed iTunes).
~
Thankfully, one can disable the support for Hardware Media Keys through some flags.
- Visit
chrome://flags/#hardware-media-key-handling - Set the dropdown value to “Disabled”
- Restart Chrome
Ah, much better now!
Thank me with a coffee.
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