Microsoft Edge for mobile could make me ditch Chrome for good: Free YouTube background play without interruptions

Google has arguably decided to make YouTube's user experience a restrictive struggle for non-Premium users. Its aggressive campaign against ad-blockers includes intentionally turning off comments and descriptions, preventing playback, and throttling videos for users who install the extensions.

Earlier this year, I reported that YouTube had blocked background play on third-party mobile browsers. The company justified the unpopular move by stating that background play is reserved exclusively for Premium subscribers. Many saw this as a blatant attempt by Google to push more users toward its Premium plan — whose monthly price recently jumped to $16/month.

However, Microsoft has found a workaround to restore background play through its experimental browser, Microsoft Edge Canary. The discovery was first spotted by sleuth Leo Varela, better known as Leopeva64 on X.

Elsewhere, Varela also spotted that Microsoft has integrated audio indicators to the tab cards in the tab switcher and an option to mute or unmute sites in the tab context menu in its Edge Canary browser.

However, as shown in the video embedded in the post on X, the option to mute sites isn’t functioning properly. As is often the case with experimental builds of Microsoft Edge, features can break or even cause crashes. It’s likely that Microsoft is already working on a fix and may roll it out soon.

Windows Central's take

It seems the experience made its way to Microsoft Edge Canary for Android in August last year via a new flag that supports background video playback.

As someone who listens to a lot of music and podcasts on my phone, especially on YouTube, I’d call this a game‑changing discovery. I’ve long used Google Chrome as my default mobile browser, but this might be the push I needed to finally switch.

• Related: Google will stop showing ads in YouTube livestreams if you meet these caveats

However, since I use an iPhone as my daily driver, there’s a chance that background video playback may not be available in Microsoft Edge Canary for iOS.

Either way, it will be interesting to see whether this feature eventually makes its way to the stable version of Microsoft Edge and, in the grander scheme of things, whether it cracks a dent in Google Chrome’s massive share of the browser market.

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