14 DAY TRIAL // The Chromium-based version of Microsoft Edge, as well as Google Chrome (which is running on the same engine) are being updated with support for YouTube thumbnails in the Windows 10 media controls overlay.
The feature is now available in both the Canary and Dev builds of Microsoft Edge browser, but also in the most recent Canary version of Google Chrome.
Basically, with this new option, whenever you listen to or watch anything on YouTube or other media sites (including… yes… adult pages), pressing the media controls on your keyboard should trigger the media controls overlay that’s offered in Windows 10 at operating system level.
In addition to the typical media controls available here, you should also see a thumbnail of the media that is playing in the browser, as well as the title of the content being played.
A collaboration with Google engineers
One of the Microsoft developers that contributed to the development of this feature said on reddit that the update was possible thanks to a collaboration with Google engineers.
“As some people noticed, this is also working in Chrome canary. I worked with a couple engineers at Google to implement this in the Chromium project,” they posted.
As others have asked, there’s no way to choose the media source that this new feature controls, and the Microsoft engineer says the target is the last focused app.
“No there's not a way to choose what it controls, I’m pretty sure it just controls the last focused app. Although that would be a good idea! Maybe like a list of all the apps and tabs that are playing media and you can select which one you want to control or set some kind of priority order?” the Microsoft dev said.
However, when multiple media sources are detected, the overlay includes an arrow that lets you jump from one to another with a click.
For the time being, this feature is still in early testing versions of the two browsers, but it should make its way to the stable builds in the coming months, at least for Google Chrome. Microsoft Edge stable doesn’t yet have a release date.