AlwaysActiveTab is a Chrome extension designed to prevent media from pausing when you switch tabs. This is particularly useful for users who want to listen to music or watch videos without keeping the tab active in the foreground. It works by overriding the Page Visibility API to make the current tab always appear active to the webpage.
- Keeps video and audio playing in background tabs.
- Simple one-click activation and deactivation.
- Works with most media sites, including YouTube, Facebook, and Spotify.
The extension manipulates the Page Visibility API so that, as far as any website is concerned, the tab with media playing is always in the foreground, even when it's not. This prevents the website from pausing media playback when the user switches to another tab.
You need Google Chrome installed on your computer.
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Download the Extension:
- Navigate to the Releases page of the AlwaysActiveTab GitHub repository.
- Download the latest release zip file.
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Unpack the Downloaded File:
- Extract the zip file to a folder on your computer.
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Load the Extension in Chrome:
- Open Google Chrome.
- Enter
chrome://extensions/in the address bar. - Enable Developer Mode by toggling the switch at the top-right corner.
- Click
Load unpacked. - Navigate to the folder where you extracted the extension files.
- Select the folder and click
Open.
- Once installed, you will see the AlwaysActiveTab icon in the Chrome toolbar.
- Click the icon whenever you want to keep media playing in the background. A popup will appear with a button labeled "Activate". Click it to make the current tab always active.
- To deactivate, simply refresh the tab or close and reopen it.
Contributions are welcome! If you'd like to contribute, please fork the repository and use a feature branch. Pull requests are warmly welcome.
This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details.