The Windows 10 volume indicator alone doesn’t bother us much, but the giant overlay to the right of the volume indicator does. It takes forever to fade and covers important screen real estate, obscuring buttons and menus. Furthermore, it regains focus upon mousing over it. Seems there’s nothing we can do about the volume indicator; can’t shift it, can’t make it smaller. However, the overlay on the right can be turned off.
Turns out it is a feature (hardware media key handling) associated with web browsers. While a video is being played (or paused), the media overlay will activate. We had to turn off the overlay feature for each browser we used. The answer was found in this YouTube vid.
Chrome
- Bring up the settings page using address bar: chrome://flags
- Search for “hardware media”
- Set Hardware Media Key Handling to disabled
Firefox
- Bring up the settings page using address bar: about:config
- Search for “hardware media”
- Set media.hardwaremediakeys.enabled to false
Apparently, some apps can also trigger the overlay. They can be turned off individually under their respective display preferences using the “Show desktop overlay when using media keys” toggle.
Nuisance disabled.