This year, Google has been on a streak of sorts, adding new features and design tweaks to Chrome Canary ahead of their stable channel release as one big visual overhaul. We’ve also seen more functional features like Live Translate for video captions and Memory saver for resource optimization show up in earlier versions of the browser. Now, Google is refining the design for these feature dialog boxes.
Chrome feature researcher and Android Police reader @Leopeva64 on Twitter recently highlighted a couple of noteworthy tweaks to Google’s dialog design on Chrome Canary. The global media controls and Memory saver info card have both changed.
If you aren’t familiar, the global media controls show up on the right-hand side of the Omnibox (address bar) in all your Chrome windows if media is playing in one or more tabs. With this, you can control media playback even if you’re on other active tabs. Until now, this dialog only showed basic info like the notification shade media controls on Android, along with a toggle for live captioning, albeit only in English.
The current universal media control dialog
In the latest Canary build, the dialog doesn’t say captions are English-only, and it also includes a shortcut to the Settings page to choose the live caption language. A new toggle to enable caption translation is also available now, when captioning is enabled. Google doesn’t bury translation language settings, though, and shows them as a drop-down combo box in the universal media controls itself.
Chrome Canary’s latest universal media controls dialog
Leopeva64 also spotted a beautiful update to the Memory saver dialog visible when you revisit a tab the feature snoozed. Just under the one-liner describing the Memory saver feature, the dialog now includes a large four-segment progress bar that fills up based on how much memory was freed by snoozing the tab. The exact number (in MB) is written underneath in large bold font.
Google’s new dialog for Memory saver
Depending on how much the progress bar filled up, Chrome also tells you if the memory savings were “small,” “medium,” “large,” or “very large.” With this design change, Google has wisely renamed the button to exempt tabs from future memory saving. The new label “keep site active” is much shorter than “never deactivate this site.”
The new Memory saver dialog design is a nice departure from the current implementation where a paragraph describing the feature includes the amount of memory saved, in tiny text.
The current state of the Memory saver dialog
These recent changes to the universal media controls and Chrome Memory saver make their dialog boxes more informative, helping Chrome become a more user-friendly browser. We’d love for these changes to show up in a stable version of the desktop program, but the wait may be a long one if Google plans to bundle everything together as a part of the big 2023 redesign.
