Google is planning a big change to how you play music on Chrome

Google is ‘shaking up’ the way you watch videos and listen to music on Chrome and is soon going to let you control playback without having to switch tabs.

Google Chrome is going to get a new floating panel soon that will allow users to play, pause, stop and also skip media without having to go to the particular tab where the content is playing. You will not have to stop what you are working on to control the media you are looking at or listening to.

First spotted by Chrome Story in June this year, this feature has been spotted again by XDA Developers who managed to enable it via a Chrome flag. Screenshots shared by XDA Developers show a floating tab with media control options on the top right corner of the screen when Chrome is in use.

With this feature enabled, you will not have to get confused about exactly which tab is playing the media, in case you have a lot of tabs open all the time, like we do. Currently, if any tab on Chrome is playing media, users can see a mic logo on the tab. However, this mic logo gets harder and harder to spot the more tabs you have open.

XDA Developers say that the code for this feature has already been added to Chrome and there is going to be a flag soon that will enable it on the Canary channel. However, not all tools appear as flags are actually rolled out - but there’s a lot to be excited about this one, so we are hopeful.

Google has experimented with media control on Chrome before. Last year they added a play button to the browser toolbar and you could stop and play music and videos without having to find the appropriate controls on the page concerned. But this new feature is more helpful as the controls will follow you across tabs.