Chrome to pause media and might change downloads for Synced background Tab Groups

In the past, Chrome stopped videos and music from playing automatically on tabs you weren’t looking at to save battery and make things run faster. Now, Chrome is looking to extend the media deferral feature to tabs within groups of tabs! This means less background noise and smoother browsing when you have a bunch of stuff open at once.

Chrome to defer media loading in background tab groups

Google Chrome already pauses media in background tabs to save resources. Google is now further improving this by applying to tab groups.

According to the “defer media load on background synced tab” commit, in Chrome, when you open a tab group and switch to another window or tab, media in those background tabs within the group won’t start playing automatically. This helps in improving device performance and battery life.

The code snippet mentions a feature flag kDeferMediaLoadInBackgroundTab which controls this behavior.
The code also refers to methods for checking and setting the media deferral state for a web page.

This change will be beneficial to users who heavily use tab groups.

Another code snippet we spotted reveals another aspect of the development related to tab groups, and it seems to be focused on restricting downloads

Download restrictions for synced tabs within a group?

This code refers to a specific state assigned to tabs within a group. It suggests Chrome might be treating tabs in a group differently compared to regular tabs.

• Downloads initiated within those tabs might be blocked entirely.
• Downloads might be paused or require additional confirmation before proceeding.

Download restrictions for synced tabs within a group might be implemented for security reasons, resource management, or synchronization purposes.

These changes likely indicate the tab is part of a synced group and allows Chrome to apply behaviors like media deferral and potentially download restrictions.

Impact on Syncing: Unclear But Potentially Important

The impact of download restrictions on syncing tab groups across devices is unclear at this point. It’s possible that downloads initiated within a synced group might not be synced to other devices. However, more information is needed to confirm this.

Since the reason for download restrictions is unknown, it’s difficult to say definitively how it might affect syncing. It could potentially impact how downloads initiated within synced tab groups are handled when syncing across devices.

These changes are currently in development according to leaked code snippets and might not be available in the stable Chrome version yet. It’s important to note that Google might modify or remove these features before the official release.

Additionally, Chrome improves location Settigns detection on Windows, and the tab Search button could be moved to the right side via a new setting.