Firefox Nightly showing Media Controls on Windows 10 Lock Screen

[steven36]

Like Google Chrome, Chromium Edge and opera browsers, Firefox also shows Media Overlay for videos when you press media keys on the keyboard. For a surprise, the latest Nightly version is displaying media controls on Windows 10 lock screen when the Firefox browser is in focus in the background.

 

 

 

Yes! Firefox supports hardware media keys for audio and video, where you can able control the playback of media with multimedia keys on the keyboard. If you use those keys while music is playing on YouTube, Firefox stable version now pops up a black box with volume bar and controls like Spotify and the above-mentioned browsers but doesn’t display the album/video thumbnail with meta information.

 

 

What even more exciting is the latest Firefox 75 (nightly) shows media controls on Lock Screen in Windows 10 while the video is playing, the UI resembles that of exhibited by Geckoview powered Firefox Fenix, which is currently under beta testing.

Make Firefox show media controls on Windows Lock Screen

1. Download and install the latest Firefox Nightly

2. Visit about:config and ensure the pref media.hardwaremediakeys.enabled value is set to true.

3. Visit YouTube and play any video, press Winkey and L to lock the screen to see Firefox media controls, you can here, able to pause, play next or previous tracks.

 

 

The thing is accidentally touching the media key causes Firefox to display the overlay even when there is no video is playing in the background. We’ve been able to turn off Firefox’s media overlay and media controls on lock screen in Windows 10 by changing media.hardwaremediakeys.enabled pref value to false. Firefox release version doesn’t honor this hidden preference though.

 

Rather than disabling overlays by visiting respective browsers or apps, Microsoft should offer a global setting for Windows to control them.

 

Source