Any way to stop Safari taking over the keyboard media buttons?

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

So all Apple keyboards have media playback controls on them (Forward/Reverse/Play/Pause), and they are extremely convenient when you use Music or playback video a lot. And I use Music a lot.

But Safari is extremely efficient at taking over said controls, and I would really like to know if there's a way to block Safari from doing this. If you have interacted with ANY audio or video in Safari, then it hijacks the media keys, even if you haven't interacted with said tabs for several hours, and it is freaking annoying. Go away from the computer and come back, press play to listen to some music? Oh no, Safari keeps repeating that german word you last interacted with on LingQ.com, 17 tabs and 4 hours ago, every time you press the button.

In my perfect world, the media keys would be used solely for Music, and I would love to be able to force the system to do so.

 

[hex_Edinburgh]

You can try:

• Open Safari
• In the menu bar, click Safari → Settings → Advanced
• Enable “Show features for web developers”
• Now in the menu bar, click Develop → Experimental Features
• Scroll down and uncheck:
  “Media Session API”
• Restart Safari

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

Thank you, I will give it a try!

 

[commanderclif]

So I've been using Mac Media Keys Forwarder for years to address this issue but not sure if it's going to be a forever solution. Came across the above and thought I'd give it a try. It seems in the last few months some things might have moved around in the developer tools. Experimental features are now under Feature Flags and closest I could find to @hex_Edinburgh suggestion above was "MediaSession capture related API". Turning that off and restarting Safari did not keep the Media Key from pausing YouTube.

 

[bogdanw]

Have you tried to disable "Fullscreen API based Keyboard lock" in Feature Flags?