New Features In Microsoft Edge Want To Make You Use The Taskbar Media Controls More Often

Microsoft Edge wants to enhance your playback experience with taskbar upgrades.

Key Takeaways

Microsoft Edge is adding new media control buttons to the Windows taskbar for a better playback experience.
These new media control options are currently being developed, but not all Edge users will see them yet.
Enhanced features, like seeking forward and backward, will soon be available to customize your playback experience.

Many users believe Microsoft isn’t doing everything right with the Edge browser to win critics over. However, on the bright side of things, Microsoft doesn’t forget to introduce new features and enhancements to what’s already available. In addition to making Copilot in Edge more potent for effective settings management, two interesting improvements the software giant is currently working on for Edge are all about making you want to use Windows taskbar media controls more often.

Screenshot showing Edge media thumbnail preview

Microsoft Edge currently doesn’t have media control options on the Windows taskbar. That means you can’t quickly pause or resume a YouTube video playing in the browser from the thumbnail preview in the taskbar. Some streaming apps like Spotify offer this feature for Windows users, and sometime in the future, Edge will also introduce something similar, or maybe better.

As first spotted by famed leaker @Leopeva64, Microsoft has been working on adding media controls to Edge’s Windows taskbar for the past few months. During the initial days of development, only play/pause and forward and backward track options were available. But now, on top of those, Microsoft has added three more buttons in the thumbnail preview of Edge on the Windows taskbar: one for mute/unmute, and the other two for seeking forward and backward.

These are useful media control options on your Windows taskbar because you can effectively customize the playback experience as per your preferences with a click of a button, all while browser windows stay minimized.

Microsoft was spotted working on media controls on the Windows taskbar for Edge Canary, and it looks like those features are still being tested internally. In other words, you won’t see those playback control options in thumbnail previews even after installing Edge Canary. But in all likelihood, they will be rolled out to all Edge Canary users when ready.