How do I prevent Chrome (Canary, v74) from hijacking media keys?

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Chrome Canary (74.0.3703.0) has started supporting media controls (I believe Chrome has added and removed this support many times over its lifetime, but this seems to be another recent addition).

On my MacBook Pro (macOS Mojave 10.14.2 (18C54)), this has the unfortunate effect of no longer allowing the medias key to operate iTunes, even when it is open and/or the focused application.

Does anyone know of a way to turn off this feature in Chrome? I have disabled the flag in chrome://flags (chrome://flags/#enable-modern-media-controls) and restarted the browser with no success.

screenshot of chrome flags with media controls disabled

Cory W.

Posted 2019-02-12T19:43:46.670

Reputation: 83

1If you have installed the Google Play Music extension, try to disable or remove it. – harrymc – 2019-02-12T20:51:53.367

@harrymc, yep, thanks, saw that in another answer as well. I didn't have it installed, but I also removed the YouTube 'app' just in case. – Cory W. – 2019-02-12T21:56:28.960

Did this fix anything? – harrymc – 2019-02-12T22:23:15.190

@harrymc oops, forgot to mention that part: no, unfortunately uninstalling the app didn't help. – Cory W. – 2019-02-12T22:30:36.283

Answers

7

Disable this flag:

Hardware Media Key Handling
Enables using media keys to control the active media session. This requires MediaSessionService to be enabled too – Mac, Windows, Chrome OS

#hardware-media-key-handling

Sander

Posted 2019-02-12T19:43:46.670

Reputation: 86

To get to the page to disable flags, type chrome://flags in the address bar. – DrZoo – 2019-03-11T20:26:23.253

1You can also directly type chrome://flags/#hardware-media-key-handling into the address bar. – Ray – 2019-03-17T18:02:30.783

Asked: 2019-02-12T19:43:46.670

Viewed: 1 260 times

Active: 2019-03-11T19:07:02.073