Mozilla working on Firefox Picture in Picture mode

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Nov 10, 2017
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Mozilla plans to integrate a picture in picture mode in the organization's Firefox web browser to play videos in a separate always-on-top frame on the desktop.

Picture in Picture mode offers two main advantages over watching videos on the webpage they are embedded on: the picture in picture frame is distraction free and acts completely independent.

It may be easier in some situations to use the viewing mode to watch a video in a small window on the desktop. While it is certainly possible to achieve the same using "full" browser windows, e.g. by positioning them accordingly, or by using third-party players, it may often be easier to use picture-in-picture for that.

Google integrated a picture-in-picture mode in the company's Chrome browser in 2018, and several other Chromium-based browsers, such as Vivaldi, support the functionality as well.

Mozilla implemented picture in picture mode functionality in Firefox Nightly already (but partially at this point). Firefox users who run the cutting edge development version of Firefox may use it play videos that are embedded on sites in a smaller window; this looks like the following:

firefox picture-in-picture mode
screenshot from

Firefox's Picture in Picture mode works on multiple sites including YouTube and Dailymotion. All that it takes is to right-click on the video -- in the case of YouTube twice to skip the custom right-click menu on the site -- to display the Picture in Picture option and select it.

The window offers no controls currently, not even an option to close it using UI elements. You may select close when you right-click on the frame, however. The frame can be resized using the mouse and it is always on top at this point.

Picture in Picture mode is still in development; sound is not working right now and the bug listing on Mozilla's bug tracking website lists two more milestones for the feature.

The feature is not enabled by default amd Firefox users need to make a configuration change to enable it before they may use it.

Mozilla won't implement the Picture in Picture WebAPI draft in Firefox at this point in time.


Control Picture in Picture mode in Firefox

firefox control picture-in-picture


  1. Load about:config in the Firefox address bar.
  2. Confirm that you will be careful if a warning is displayed.
  3. Search for media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.enabled
  4. Double-click on the preference (or use toggle) to change its value.
A value of True means that Picture in Picture mode is enabled in Firefox, a value of False that the feature is disabled.

Closing Words
Mozilla launched the Min Vid Test Pilot experiment back in 2016 which introduced a picture in picture mode in the Firefox browser. The new implementation appears to be unrelated to the experiment. The Test Pilot program ended in January 2019.

The target version of Firefox to support Picture in Picture mode natively has not been revealed yet.

Source: Mozilla working on Firefox Picture in Picture mode - gHacks Tech News
 

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