Early adopters of Microsoft’s Chromium Edge web browser preview are receiving a new feature this week. Microsoft has announced the browser now features deeper media overlays. Specifically, Chromium Edge now lets users easily pause media content such as YouTube that is playing within the browser.
This is a direct copy of the media overlay tool in Windows 10. If you are unfamiliar with volume on the Windows platform, there are two features. The first is the traditional volume slider and the other is the media overlay.
Windows 10 uses the media overlay to give users the ability to pause video content quickly. The overlay appears on the screen when media is playing and follows you around Windows 10. That same tool is now coming to Chromium Edge.
On the browser, media overlay will sync the thumbnail from YouTube content alongside the video name and controls. When browsing in Edge, the overlay appears on the left side of the screen. Users can pause the YouTube video or control the volume.
While the media overlay on Windows 10 allows you to skip tracks, the overlay for Chromium Edge does not allow skipping.
Available on Edge and Chrome
As this is a Chromium development, it is available on both Edge and Google’s Chrome browser. On Reddit, a Microsoft employee said media overlay is currently available in Chromium Edge Canary and Chrome Canary development branches.
“I’m the developer at Microsoft that worked on this feature. I’m so happy to see so many people enjoy it. 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,” the engineer said.
