How to Fix That Annoying Volume Pop-Up in Google Chrome

Don't you hate it when you're streaming your favorite radio station (we love you too) on your laptop and that annoying volume pop-up takes over the upper left-hand side of your screen?

It's been happening to me when I use the volume hotkeys on my laptop for a while now. I always just put up with it, but today I was working in multiple Google Chrome tabs and got sick of waiting for the stupid thing to disappear so I could click the tabs behind it.

I finally got fed up and did a little Googling to see if I could get rid of it. Thankfully, it's really easy to do.

Yes, the problem does lie in Chrome, an otherwise perfectly fine browser. (Even if its prerendering feature does eat up a little extra memory.)

To turn that big, annoying block off for good, the first step is to copy and paste the address below into your address bar. It's perfectly safe, and just takes you to some behind-the-scenes settings in Chrome.

chrome://flags/#hardware-media-key-handling

That address should take you straight to the Hardware Media Key Handling setting in Chrome. If that setting reads Default or Enabled, there's your problem.

To turn the annoying feature off, click the drop-down arrow next to Default or Enabled, then select Disabled. Now you'll have a couple of options. You can either close this tab and the change will take affect the next time you close and re-open Chrome, or you can click the Relaunch button at the bottom right of your screen.

WARNING: If you click Relaunch, Chrome will close and re-open itself automatically, so make sure you've saved or bookmarked anything you're working on. It can also help to have your Chrome settings tweaked to re-open all your tabs each time you start it.

After relaunching, or the next time you open Google Chrome, that craptastic volume pop-up won't be bothering you anymore unless your Chrome settings somehow get reset.

I hope this helpful information for anyone else who's been putting up with that thing and is sick of it.