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Home / Chromebook / Chromebook Media Controls to Move to Quick Settings

Chromebook Media Controls to Move to Quick Settings

September 17, 2020 by Dinsan Francis Updated on: 10:49 pm 2 Comments

Contents

  • 1 Global Media Controls
  • 2 GMC in Quick Settings
  • 3 Summary
    • 3.1 Related

Global Media Controls (GMC), the tile that lets you control media playback on Chromebook, is moving to the quick settings area on the desktop.

Update – 25-SEP-2020: You will be able to pin or unpin Global Media Controls from the Quick Settings menu. Source: Chromium Gerrit.

Update – 25-SEP-2020: This is now available in the Canary channel of Chrome OS. In fact, you can control media playback from three different places:

  • The regular notification (which will soon go away)
  • Quick settings
  • Global Media Control Icon

Global Media Controls

Global Media Controls or GMC is Google’s effort to unity media playback controls across all platforms.

You will see the similar UI on Chrome, Chrome OS and even Android.

From GMC, you can pause or resume playback while playing a YouTube video and music from Spotify, etc. On a Chromebook, you can enable Picture in Picture mode as well from here.

There are plans to add Chromecast controls as well to this menu.

To summarize, GMC will be the media hub for Chrome and Chrome OS.

GMC in Quick Settings

A code change request I spotted today talks about moving GMC to the Quick Settings area on Chromebooks.

Quick Settings is the panel that pops up when you click time/battery icons on the bottom-right corner of your Chromebook desktop. Here is how GMC looks like on the Chrome OS notification area now.

Chromebook notification area
Chromebook notification area

You can see the YouTube player notification there with options to pause and move tracks.

Now, here is the proposed new design:

New Chrome OS Quick Settings
New Chrome OS Quick Settings

Notice the media controls within the Quick Settings tile? I also see a media icon next to the battery icon.

The feature request bug for this change has a video demo as well.

The current UI has an “x” icon to remove media notification. I accidentally clicked it and removed playback controls a couple of times.

The new design takes that away. I will no longer accidentally remove them. However, if you usually close this notification, this change might disappoint you.

Summary

Global Media Controls in the Quick Settings panel will make it easy to access and use. However, lack of an option to remove this notification might be a disappointment for a few.

What do you think, is this a welcome change, or something that will add clutter to the Quick Settings panel?

Related Reading

  • Enable Picture in Picture from Chrome’s Media Control Toolbar Icon
  • Control Chromecast Playback from Chrome Toolbar
  • Chrome’s Global Media Control Can Soon be Turned into an Always-on-top Overlay
  • Chrome to Let you Control Media Playback from the Toolbar (Global Media Control)

Source: Chromium Gerrit & bugs.chromium.org.

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Filed Under: Chromebook

About Dinsan Francis

Content Developer and Digital Minimalist. Loves testing new Chromebook features and writing about them. Favorite Chrome OS Channel is Canary. | Twitter

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. RB says

    September 17, 2020 at 2:06 pm

    I prefer GMC in the quick settings. I’m always clearing all my notifications, which also clears the GMC notification. This simplifies things for me. I like simple things.

    I wonder how it will handle multiple GMC notifications. For instance, if I’m on Zoom and I listen to a WhatsApp voice memo, there’ll be two GMC notifications in my notifications. Will the same happen here? We must wait to see…

    Keep up the awesome work! Your blog is my first port of call for Chrome news. I notice you’re the source for a lot of the bigger blogs. Save time and subscribe to Chrome Story.

    Reply
    • Dinsan Francis says

      September 17, 2020 at 4:30 pm

      Thank you so much!

      Reply

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