Picture In Picture mode is arriving soon for Desktop Google Chrome

Picture in Picture mode is coming to desktop Google Chrome, following an announcement in September of last year which promised the feature. This feature has been sought after by many, especially those who may have a reduced screen size. Picture in Picture mode will allow users to watch videos from many different sites in a smaller window that will be drawn over all others if it works similarly to its Android implementation.

Which, according to the commit description, it does. This will allow users to enjoy, for example, a YouTube video in a smaller window which can always be in focus over the currently running applications without it falling to the background when opening another application.

It’s a simple addition and has lots of uses ranging from productivity to relaxation. You can watch a tutorial while carrying out other tasks along with the video without switching windows constantly, or relax and watch a movie while messaging your friends. There’s a lot of uses, and if implemented right will be a welcome addition to Google Chrome.

Picture-in-picture mode on Android Oreo. Source: Google.

Of course, individual web developers will have to support the feature themselves through a Web API. This doesn’t suddenly mean that anywhere with a playing video will now automatically play everywhere if the client has the feature enabled, but it paves the way for websites to begin to support the feature in future. Sites like YouTube and Vimeo might not be supporting it right off the bat, and we don’t know how it will work with sites with stricter DRM like Netflix.

There’s a whole lot that we simply just don’t know, and Google could actually circumvent this entirely and simply force all playing video to support it like they did with Google Chrome in Android Oreo. Any playing video will automatically support picture in picture mode unless a web developer intervenes with a hack written by Google. We can expect to see the change coming in the coming months to the Google Chrome stable channel.

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