Chrome extension 1.1: start and stop from the toolbar

Chrome Extension update TL;DR: With 1.1.0, you can now start and stop your recordings from the extension. Without taking you off the page.

The update is rolling out through the Chrome Web Store now. If you already have the extension, Chrome will pick it up on its own. If you don't, add Tape Screen Recorder and you'll get 1.1 straight away.

What's new

Stop from the toolbar. Click the Tape icon while a recording is running and the popup becomes your recording control: a pulsing dot, a live timer, and a big Stop button. Click it and you land on the preview, ready to trim and share, exactly as if you'd stopped from the Tape tab.

Alt+Shift+R now toggles. Press it once to start, press it again to stop. One shortcut for the whole loop, so you never take your hands off the keyboard or your eyes off what you're showing.

A REC badge on the icon. For the length of the recording the toolbar icon carries a small orange badge. At a glance you know it's running, and you know where Stop lives.

Floating controls, front and centre. The controls window (timer, mic meter, Stop) opens in the bottom-right corner of the window you started from and stays on top while you set up. Together with the toolbar, that's a Stop button within reach wherever you are.

The flow now

1. Open the page you want to show.
2. Click the Tape icon or press Alt+Shift+R, choose tab, window or screen, and go.
3. Talk through it.
4. Press Alt+Shift+R again, or click the icon and hit Stop.
5. Trim the ends on the preview, then share the link or download the file.

Steps 2 through 4 happen without leaving your page. That's the bit this release completes.

Under the hood, nothing moved

The extension is still a capture broker. It asks Chrome for permission to capture what you chose and hands that to Tape's recorder page, which does the recording, the trim, the AI title, summary and transcript, and the share link. Stop works the same way: the extension sends the page a single "stop now" message, the same one the page's own button sends. Nothing new is captured, stored or sent anywhere. Recording and download stay free and unlimited, with no watermark on the video.

Getting the update

Chrome updates extensions on its own, usually within a few hours of a version going live. If you'd like it sooner, open chrome://extensions, turn on Developer mode and click Update. You'll know you're on 1.1 when the Tape popup shows a timer mid-recording.

Because the recording itself lives on the Tape page, an update arriving mid-recording changes nothing about that recording. Stop it from the Tape tab as before, and every recording after that has the new controls.

Keep them coming

This release came straight out of using the extension for real and noticing what would make it faster. If you've got a suggestion, or something in your setup behaves differently, email support. Ideas that make the record-to-link loop shorter go to the top of the list.