Reintroduce Flag for ignoring Media Control Keys

[jazzschmidt]

Description

Previously it was possible to prevent Brave from hijacking the media control keys by disabling the Hardware Media Key Handling , namely chrome://flags/#hardware-media-key-handling in the experimental settings.

This option has been removed and makes it impossible to pause any media application when opening a YouTube video for example. Most of the time you can additionally pause those videos via spacebar. I would love to see this option coming back - maybe even in the normal settings page.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Play music in the background, e.g. with Spotify
2. Open up any YouTube video
3. Press Play/Pause to pause the music

Actual result:

The video pauses, forcing me to use more keyboard shortcuts or even the mouse to stop the music, return to the video and watch it.

Expected result:

Music in background stops because I don't want my browser to hijack the media control keys and I can control YouTube with normal keys.

Reproduces how often:

Always; the option for disabling it has been removed.

Brave version (brave://version info)

Brave: 1.38.109 Chromium: 101.0.4951.41 (Official Build) (arm64)
Revision 93c720db8323b3ec10d056025ab95c23a31997c9-refs/branch-heads/4951@{#904}
OS macOS Version 12.0.1 (Build 21A559)

Other Additional Information:

• Is the issue reproducible on the latest version of Chrome?
  I got Chrome 100.0.4896.127 that still has the option.

Miscellaneous Information:

If there are no plans to reintroduce this feature, is there another solution? Maybe some sort of plugin that prevents Brave on hijacking or some options I could use, when building it from source?

[jazzschmidt]

May be related to #19603

[jazzschmidt]

I found a temporary solution at the Brave Community: media key option disappeared/gone/not showing up.

They suggest to enable #temporary-unexpire-flags-m100 which did the trick, but the documentation states that these options will soon disappear:

Temporarily unexpire flags that expired as of M100. These flags will be removed soon. – Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, Fuchsia

Is this a Chromium problem? Any suggestions how to proceed with that?

[jazzschmidt]

According to this Reddit post the flag is already unexpired and will in fact be introduced as normal setting as per Chromium 113 and will at least be unhidden with 102.

Closing this issue now.