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> You can pause and play audio or video in Firefox right from your keyboard or headset, giving you easy access to control your media when in another Firefox tab

> You can pause and play audio or video in Firefox right from your keyboard or headset, giving you easy access to control your media when in another Firefox tab, another program, or even when your computer is locked I really hope that this is is going to be a user-facing option and not hidden away in about:config (or not configurable at all). I already have a media player using global media shortcuts, thank you. Browsers need to stop assuming that they are the only app in the room.

skymt 6y ago
I looked for a way to disable the media keys feature when it landed in Developer Edition and it seems to be only in about:config. The key is "media.hardwaremediakeys.enabled".
- TonyTrapp 6y ago
  Oh well. I guess "having an actual media player that observes to media keys" is "very advanced PC usage" in the year 2020, so that fully justifies hiding it in about:config. Sad.
  - bickeringyokel 6y ago
    I'm starting to think that the concept of "files" is starting to be a very advanced concept for some people these days.
  - Dahoon 6y ago
    If the OS is worth its salt it knows which media player is playing and lets you control it. I don't see how this could ever be a problem. It is no different than having two mediaplayers installed. I have never seen the wrong mediaplayer suddenly being controlled. Just set whatever as standard/default. Works fine in Android, Linux and Windows.
    - the_pwner224 6y ago
      On Android you can't (almost always) play multiple media at the same time, so that's not an issue. The first media will pause when you start the next. However this is a stupid limitation, only plausibly appropriate for phones. On computers you frequently have multiple medias playing at the same time and it is not possible to control all of them with one set of media control keys. The OS can guess but will often get it wrong. You have music playing in the background and you start a YouTube video and then hit pause. What gets paused? On my current system, it's (usually) the YT video in Firefox. This is wrong because I want to pause the background music so that I can listen to the video. On another system it might instead pause the background music. That is wrong because I wanted to pause/unpause the active YT video that I've been watching for the past 15 minutes. I ended up disabling Firefox's thingy in about:config because this gets pretty frustrating after a while.
nathancahill 6y ago
I believe the operating system should handle determining which media player has "focus"? For example, I play music on iTunes and Spotify, and can control both with media shortcuts depending on which is being used in the background. This Firefox fix allows Firefox to behave like any other app.
- TonyTrapp 6y ago
  But that's the entire point of using global shortcuts - I never have my media player focussed. I specifically had to enable global media shortcuts in it and Firefox should do the same: ask the user if they want this feature, and not assume that no other application might want to get hold of a global resource. As always, the mind game "what happened everyone did it like that?" is very important here. Anyway, I just got the Firefox update and it seems like my media player seems to "win" over the global shortcut from Firefox that I didn't ask for. So all is good for now...
  - nathancahill 6y ago
    That's why I put "focus" in quotes. It's not in the forefront, but the OS remembers which media player has control.
  - zanny 6y ago
    At least on KDE media focus is first come first serve. The first media player to start playing gets the media keys until it stops and then whatever else is playing or plays next gets them. The only unintuitive part is that maybe it should first try to play / pause the active window before delegating to that priority.

skymt 6y ago

I looked for a way to disable the media keys feature when it landed in Developer Edition and it seems to be only in about:config. The key is "media.hardwaremediakeys.enabled".

TonyTrapp 6y ago
Oh well. I guess "having an actual media player that observes to media keys" is "very advanced PC usage" in the year 2020, so that fully justifies hiding it in about:config. Sad.
- bickeringyokel 6y ago
  I'm starting to think that the concept of "files" is starting to be a very advanced concept for some people these days.
- Dahoon 6y ago
  If the OS is worth its salt it knows which media player is playing and lets you control it. I don't see how this could ever be a problem. It is no different than having two mediaplayers installed. I have never seen the wrong mediaplayer suddenly being controlled. Just set whatever as standard/default. Works fine in Android, Linux and Windows.
  - the_pwner224 6y ago
    On Android you can't (almost always) play multiple media at the same time, so that's not an issue. The first media will pause when you start the next. However this is a stupid limitation, only plausibly appropriate for phones. On computers you frequently have multiple medias playing at the same time and it is not possible to control all of them with one set of media control keys. The OS can guess but will often get it wrong. You have music playing in the background and you start a YouTube video and then hit pause. What gets paused? On my current system, it's (usually) the YT video in Firefox. This is wrong because I want to pause the background music so that I can listen to the video. On another system it might instead pause the background music. That is wrong because I wanted to pause/unpause the active YT video that I've been watching for the past 15 minutes. I ended up disabling Firefox's thingy in about:config because this gets pretty frustrating after a while.

nathancahill 6y ago

I believe the operating system should handle determining which media player has "focus"? For example, I play music on iTunes and Spotify, and can control both with media shortcuts depending on which is being used in the background. This Firefox fix allows Firefox to behave like any other app.

TonyTrapp 6y ago
But that's the entire point of using global shortcuts - I never have my media player focussed. I specifically had to enable global media shortcuts in it and Firefox should do the same: ask the user if they want this feature, and not assume that no other application might want to get hold of a global resource. As always, the mind game "what happened everyone did it like that?" is very important here. Anyway, I just got the Firefox update and it seems like my media player seems to "win" over the global shortcut from Firefox that I didn't ask for. So all is good for now...
- nathancahill 6y ago
  That's why I put "focus" in quotes. It's not in the forefront, but the OS remembers which media player has control.
- zanny 6y ago
  At least on KDE media focus is first come first serve. The first media player to start playing gets the media keys until it stops and then whatever else is playing or plays next gets them. The only unintuitive part is that maybe it should first try to play / pause the active window before delegating to that priority.