Google Chrome for Android will soon get YouTube’s Double Tap to Fast Forward or Rewind Feature

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Earlier this year, Google added a nifty new feature to the YouTube app: double tap on the sides of a video to fast forward or rewind 10 seconds. This feature started to roll out to some users in January before it was officially enabled in a later February build. And now, that same feature is coming to Google Chrome for Android starting with the latest nightly builds of Chrome Canary and Chromium.

The other night, I discovered a few new commits in the open source Chromium gerrit that add double tap gesture recognition to the media control overlay. Looking at the files, it mentions that the video will jump forwards or backwards 10 seconds if the user double taps on the sides of the video. This is the same playback control behavior in the YouTube app.

Looking further, I found out that this feature can be enabled right now if you are on one of the latest builds of Google Chrome for Android. You’ll need to either be on the latest Chrome Canary build (v65.0.3301.0) or on a comparable Chromium build.

In order to enable this feature (as well as all of Chrome’s new media playback controls), you’ll need to enable a special flag in chrome://flags. Simply paste the following line into your browser’s address bar, enable the feature, then restart the browser. Then, you will be able to double tap to fast forward or rewind any video that is played back through Chrome’s built-in media player.

chrome://flags#enable-modern-media-controls

Enjoy the new feature! Besides this, there are a couple of other upcoming features to get excited about. Google has announced that native ad-blocking (for non-compliant ads) will arrive on February 15th. We also discovered that Chrome will soon support parallel downloads for download acceleration and HDR video playback for higher video quality on supported devices. As soon as we find more interesting Google Chrome related news to share, you’ll be the first to find out on the XDA Portal. Stay tuned!

P.S. If you’re wondering what the app is that caused a superuser toast message in my video, it’s Ambient Lock Screen Music—a root app which shows the title and artist on the ambient display lock screen of whatever media is currently playing. It’s exclusive to the Google Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL, but can also work if you enable Always on Display on the Nexus 6P, Pixel, or Pixel XL.