12 ms·

Firefox Picture-in-Picture

251 points by raldu 6y ago

SubiculumCode 6y ago
This is great. Will it work with Netflix videos in the browser? The always on top is a nice feature for this kind of thing
- maxwellito 6y ago
  Yes! It works with any video tag. I just tried it with Netflix, it works like a charm!
- beirut_bootleg 6y ago
  It does work with Netflix. Unfortunately you won't get any subtitles.
jackson1442 6y ago
I've been using it with their Dev Edition and it works very nicely for me. On a Mac, it blends in with the design language, and works on just about any video, even video that's been DRM'd to hell and back (Netflix, Hulu, etc).
hasbot 6y ago
I've been using this a lot lately for YouTube videos so I can watch a video and keep web surfing. Works great, though the PiP doesn't have all the controls (e.g. volume and seek).
- stronglikedan 6y ago
  The amount of video/audio player clients in general that don't have a seek function is, quite frankly, astonishing to me.
- 0-_-0 6y ago
  Even the youtube shortcuts don't work (J/L for long seek and left/right for short seek)
dsego 6y ago
What's new here? I've been under the impression this existed for a while. Does it finally provide the standard video controls?
nanna 6y ago
Must admit I've noticed the blue Picture-in-Picture but never thought to click on it. Didn't at all occur to me what it did.
bentcorner 6y ago
PiP is such a great feature. I have no idea how easy/hard it was to implement but it feels nice to use. It does exactly what you'd expect it to do and nothing more. I use it while watching overwatch league games in the browser because it allows me to resize the popped-out video arbitrarily, instead of the site's embedded youtube player options of either tiny-window-in-browser or full-screen sizes (there is no theater mode in the embedded player for some reason).
- zozos 6y ago
  Same. It's great.
- ashconnor 6y ago
  It works better than the native support on OSX. A lot of videos I watch on Safari don't show the PIP button but work fine on Firefox.
  - mikewhy 6y ago
    In Safari, you can right-click the speaker icon in the tab or address bar, and there's a PIP option in the menu. Not as accessible as Firefox for sure.
    - mthoms 6y ago
      Good to know, thanks. I suspect right click doesn't work when there's a transparent div over the video.
      - mikewhy 6y ago
        Luckily this is all in the browser's UI, nothing a webpage can do to block that.
    - cstuder 6y ago
      Well, that's exceptionally well hidden. Thank you for the tip.
tushar-r 6y ago
This is brilliant! I've been looking for a replacement for Helium on Windows and this seems to be it!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
detaro 6y ago
Mozilla Tech Blog from January on implementing it: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/01/how-we-built-picture-in-picture-in-firefox-desktop/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/01/how-we-built-picture-in-pi... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22283386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22283386)
kords 6y ago
I've tried it, it's awesome. The things I'm missing in that new window are progress bar and volume control. Or at least I haven't seen a way to make them visible.
staycoolboy 6y ago
I've been using this since it was launched and I constantly forget that I need to keep the browser tab open for PIP to work. Doh. Would be cool if the PiP window was another instance of the native window with its zero-decor.
classics2 6y ago
YouTube charges for this “feature”. How will that go over?
- dhritzkiv 6y ago
  They do? As in, paying will expose a control on their player to enter PiP in supported platforms? Note: other than FF, you can also trigger PiP (edit: on Safari) on a YouTube video by double-right-clicking on the video element OR long pressing on the speaker icon on the tab/address bar.
  - recursive 6y ago
    > other than FF, you can also trigger PiP on a YouTube video by double-right-clicking on the video element OR long pressing on the speaker icon on the tab/address bar. Neither of these worked for me. Chrome 83 on Win 10.
    - dhritzkiv 6y ago
      Oops - sorry! I forgot to include the important bit about Safari on macOS. Updated my comment.
  - input_sh 6y ago
    YouTube app on Android supported this some time ago. If you were playing a video and then wanted to go to some other app, a small floating window appeared with that video playing. It was then locked away behind YouTube Premium, and now YouTube (non-premium) occasionally bugs you to pay for the premium when you try switching to another app so that you can continue playback.
  - chadcmulligan 6y ago
    > YouTube video by double-right-clicking on the video element OR long pressing on the speaker icon on the tab/address bar. I've been using pipifier for this - especially for Netflix, didn't know about this until now - thanks
- recursive 6y ago
jdlyga 6y ago
Doesn't Chrome do this too? If you click the music button in the toolbar, you can pop out a video to an always-on-top window that you can watch overtop of other apps.
yuchi 6y ago
«Toddler duty» is a fantastic marketing approach to the feature! (While I usually deprecate using videos to entertain toddlers and kids, using it to have them close to you looks… good I guess)
fulafel 6y ago
This is normally a window manager feature, why put it in browser where it's limited to browser tabs?
- slipheen 6y ago
  I'm not sure I understand what you mean about browser tabs. This pops the video outside of the browser's chrome, so you can drag it wherever you want. They implemented it in Firefox because Firefox is the one detecting and playing the video? MacOS already has a similar feature, but AFAIK it only works in Safari.
  - fulafel 6y ago
    I mean it's limited to content managed by the browser, whereas the native WM way works for all apps.
    - slipheen 6y ago
      I guess I don't know enough about how WMs work. :( I'm curious how the WM could detect that the a portion of a window is playing video, and break that out into it's own movable window? I'm not sure how you do that without the browser managing that.
      - TD-Linux 6y ago
        It can't. (on some platforms, the video ends up on a compositor subsurface, but so can many other portions of an app so trying to make a PiP feature out of that would probably not work well)
      - fulafel 6y ago
        But you don't want it to be limited to plain video players - videoconferencing apps, games, and various real-time data displays etc are good fits to pip too. You are able to pipify any window without the app having to explicitly support it.
ozaark 6y ago
Opera has had this feature for years and features more playback controls than FF. It seems many features start on Opera then get "invented" in other browsers afterwards.
- ozaark 6y ago
  Downvoted for providing a relevant fact as well as an observation? Gee thanks
  - thephyber 6y ago
    I didn't downvote but I considered it. The second sentence was unnecessary and almost snide.
- forgotpwd16 6y ago
  You're right that it has been in Opera for years. Specifically it was introduced back in 2016. But Maxthon had it first, introducing it in 2010. Snaps or webpage screenshoting as well (2010), which was later put in Opera (2017) and recently on Firefox.
bvm 6y ago
I love PiP but I wish it worked for multiple videos simultaneously on desktop.
- tedmiston 6y ago
  That sounds potentially interesting. Do you have a specific use case in mind?
  - bvm 6y ago
    yeh! I like watching rocket launches from multiple camera angles! And i watch a lot of simracing with multiple streamers streaming the same race.
    - ta17711771 6y ago
      VLC
- numpad0 6y ago
  I just snap off the tabs and hang them on 4th and 5th monitors... then I forget having them and the vehicle is already past Max Q.
WmyEE0UsWAwC2i 6y ago
This is a nice feature. > play alongside while you go about your business on > other tabs or do things outside of Firefox. Do we need to watch video while we go about our business? You better finish your business or the video. Which leaves me thinking: this is kind of bloat.
- WmyEE0UsWAwC2i 6y ago
  And this is why HN should't have implemented angry-vote.
  - WmyEE0UsWAwC2i 6y ago
    You are angry because it's true.
- art4ur 6y ago
  It doesn't feel like bloat to me. It makes my experience better.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  > Do we need to watch video while we go about our business? You better finish your business or the video. Yes, and don't tell me how to do my work.
brospars 6y ago
Wait this is not new is it ? Ive beenm using it for the past 6 months at least...
- ckcheng 6y ago
  Yeah, I've been able to use it for months (FF on Mac)... Was it rolled out to certain computers for testing before?
  - 00deadbeef 6y ago
    Same here. FF on Mac. I’ve been using it since lockdown began in the UK in March. It’s been really handy to keep BBC News in the corner of the screen when the Government was doing daily briefings.
  - Izkata 6y ago
    Firefox on Ubuntu here, also for months at least - don't remember when exactly though.
- jakemal 6y ago
  The linked article was posted on January 6th, 2020. For some reason many people received an email about it today. Must have just been a soft rollout and now they are starting to actually publicize the feature?
sylens 6y ago
This seems like a massive feature that I can't believe hasn't been baked into Chrome yet. I know Safari has an implementation but it always feels limited and of course cannot be used on Windows or Linux. I need to put this through its paces, but it may vault Firefox back into the role of my default browser.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  While it is truly a nice feature, it is hardly the main reason why should anyone concerned with the future of the web use Firefox as default browser.
  - huxflux 6y ago
    Actually, this is the main reason why I had Opera installed on three computers for three years. All uninstalled now.
- CryZe 6y ago
  Chrome has this as well. However it's kinda hidden (in that you need to trigger it from JavaScript / need an extension to trigger it for you).
- forgotpwd16 6y ago
  Chrome has it for about two years now, since ver. 70. On a Youtube video right-click twice and click "Picture in picture".
  - tedmiston 6y ago
    I don't seem to have a "Picture in picture" option in the context menu on an arbitrary YouTube video on Chrome 84 beta on macOS. But there is a PiP button in the "hamburger with musical note" menu in the toolbar. It seems Google has an optional PiP Chrome extension as well. It looks like it just makes the button more visible. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/picture-in-picture-extens/hkgfoiooedgoejojocmhlaklaeopbecg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/picture-in-picture...
raspyberr 6y ago
I'm sure this works great but I've been using MPV/youtube-dl for a while now and I don't think this will cause me to switch.
phkahler 6y ago
This should be more of a desktop feature. I'd like to play video wallpaper on gnome/wayland for example. I think this is as much on the desktop devs as the browser devs, if not moreso.
51Cards 6y ago
I use this feature on a daily basis, in fact it's running right now. I have a few UI issues with it, the resize border is much too hard to hit, it would be nice to be able to click the video to pause, and I would like to see a progress bar and mute buttons. That said it has already been a "game changer" for how I view video every day.
anotheryou 6y ago
I want a "fullscreen to second screen" option for it (also without allways on top than)
- kords 6y ago
  I use double-click for fullscreen, but yeah, it will go on top.
os7borne 6y ago
PiP is so functional and I've been using it for sometime now.
pixelatedindex 6y ago
It's too bad that YouTube subtitles still show up in the main YT page and is not present in the PiP modal.
- suzakus 6y ago
  This is a technical restriction with PIP not allowing for elements to be drawn in the PiP modal (or more specifically; HTMLVideoElement is the only thing that can be PiPed currently)
dingaling 6y ago
This would be great for PiPing a general webpage rather than just a video. Instead of tearing-off a tab, resizing its window and pinning it always-on-top to use as a reference.
avian 6y ago
Is anyone else annoyed that Mozilla chose to spam them with an ad for this new feature via the email address they received when creating the Firefox sync account? Is this really such an important thing that warrants sending an unsolicited message to every Firefox user's inbox? Yes, the footer says "You're receiving this email because .. is subscribed to Firefox Account Tips." and indeed I can now see that setting in my Firefox account. I'm sure that checkbox popped up sometime after I created the account and was conveniently set to "true" by default.
- anonymousab 6y ago
  There's also conveniently a new category whenever they want to make sure everyone has to be bothered by the newest junk. Or a very slight rename of an existing one, but hey, that means they get to ignore the previous setting. To me, such sleazy tactics are simply a deep admission of failure.
- wonderlg 6y ago
  Things like this make it hard to take Firefox’ stand on privacy seriously. They keep making “mistakes” like this all the time unapologetically. I marked the email as spam because that’s what it is.
- james412 6y ago
  The horror
  - 65536 6y ago
    Email is a dumpster fire. I run my own mail server and I don’t have any spam filtering. My inbox is full of spam and “helpful tips” and other garbage. Because of this I rarely read my email. I would set up spam filtering but I don’t trust SpamAssasin to actually be useful rather than just another headache, because last time I was on a system where it was in use it routinely marked non-spam things as spam while simultaneously letting through a whole lot of spam. Admittedly this was years ago. I did find Paul Graham’s essay on spam filtering inspiring and thought about doing something like that for myself. But although I have a huge corpus of spam, I don’t have a whole lot of non-spam because I don’t receive a lot of non-spam. Spam is also annoying and uninspiring to do anything about because it is just yet another of the billions of problems that we have that were caused by other people being inconsiderate dicks :( It currently feels like almost all problems that I could work on should not have existed in the first place and are only there because of us all being the way that we are.
knasmai 6y ago
I love PiP and it's def great in WFH situation where I can just have YouTube videos playing on the side. If anyone from Mozilla is reading this, one thing I wish Firefox did was to allow us to make it sticky to the corner like Safari does on MacOS. I think just throwing the PiP window to a corner and expecting it to be there is subtle difference but makes the overall experience much simpler. I don't having to decide where exactly to position the video and keep moving it little by little. Also, if I push the Safari PiP video against the edge of the screen, it simply collapses. That's helpful when the video is blocking something I care about and I need to quickly hide it. Again, simpler experience than allowing free form movement for my workflow.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Yeah, sadly Firefox doesn't use the native PiP implementation :(
actionowl 6y ago
I'm really surprised to see how many people appreciate this feature. I've tried to use it many times but I've found that when I'm watching a video I either want to give it my full(screen) attention (movie, entertainment) or have it in the background entirely (music, news, podcast.) I've personally not found a use for it and end up closing it after about 5-10 minutes.
- SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
  I like more than thought I would. I can keep going through tabs without losing the video. The problem for me is it doesn’t have controls past pause and play. If I want to back the video up or skip it forward I need to go figure out which tab it’s coming from, and I can’t remember if I have to unpop to get controls. Windows 10, ymmv.
  - avery42 6y ago
    This also annoys me. Even just allowing arrow keys to seek back and forth would be enough for now.
    - CanisDirus 6y ago
      That can be enabled with media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.keyboard-controls.enabled toggle in about:config.
      - avery42 6y ago
        Woah that's perfect, thank you!
    - childintime 6y ago
      Also, the controls have changed: a single click doesn't pause the window as it normally does. Why change?? :/
- SECProto 6y ago
  i use it when i'm watching a youtube or other video that has interesting parts, but also lots of fluff. PiP lets me do other things and mostly ignore the fluff
gbolcer 6y ago
There are a couple of sites that auto-started video and when you scrolled down, automatically did picture-in-picture. In fact I think Facebook even experimented with it for a while. The problem with those implementations was that the user had no control over which videos, nor the ability to prevent them from displaying. It took a heavy amount of NoScript isolation to prevent it from happening. I always thought it would be useful if someone would write something that put the user back in control.
xmichael0 6y ago
Opera has been doing this for years...
etempleton 6y ago
This is a great feature and I love Firefox and what Mozilla stands for, but I have recently switched to Edge because of how hard my CPU is hit when I watch YouTube videos in Firefox. I understand that this is not entirely within the control of Mozilla and the Firefox team, but it became such an issue on my current machine, which is admittedly quite old, that I felt forced to make the switch.
aaron695 6y ago
If we are going to destroy our brains we might as do it well!
thamer 6y ago
For Chromium-based browsers (I used it in Brave but it should work with all of them), create a new bookmark and set this as the URL: javascript:document.querySelector('video').requestPictureInPicture() It works on YouTube, Twitch, HBO Now, Netflix, probably others too. I keep it in my Bookmarks Bar for quick access, I hope others here will find it useful!
somishere 6y ago
I've been enjoying this for a while on the beta channel, however subs/captions are very noticeably absent. Unsure if it's all <tracks> or just those not using the built-in api for display. Needless to say custom caption implementations are extremely common due to the discrepancies in display between browsers.
bondolo 6y ago
I am glad it can be disabled globally easily. YMMV
kgwxd 6y ago
Have other hardcore anti-autoplay users noticed some autoplay getting through as of the last update? I've had it at the highest possible settings for a long time and nothing ever got through, now something is different. It not all the time, but often enough that it bugs me.
chrysoprace 6y ago
I really love this feature and I hope that it receives more love and polish in the future. It's unfortunately unusable with foreign language videos as the subtitles don't pop out with the video. Not sure if this is due to the lack of such an API, or if the major video providers (Netflix, YouTube, etc.) simply haven't implemented it. My other wishlist feature is to have rewind/forward controls natively in the PIP window.
- suzakus 6y ago
  Unless the captions are burned in, currently you cannot have the captions show up in the PiP video due to the API restrictions. It's mentioned in the proposal doc here: https://www.w3.org/TR/picture-in-picture/#security-considerations https://www.w3.org/TR/picture-in-picture/#security-considera...
  - chrysoprace 6y ago
    Thank you. I was trying to find information on this, but all I found was this bugzilla post: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1551058 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1551058
kevincox 6y ago
I wish it worked by using the regular web fullscreen API to pop out. Instead of going fullscreen it would just spawn a chromeless window that I can position anywhere I want and control using my regular window manager controls. As an advantage this would give sites full control over the content including having the full video (or other content) controls instead of just play which is what Firefox PiP gives you.
- hobos_delight 6y ago
  I completely agree - I use i3 and was interested to see that this just pops up a floating window over all of my others. When reading the feature my thought was that it would be a floating window _within_ the browser window - which I think I would have preferred.
  - kevincox 6y ago
    I disagree with that. The browser already does too much "window management" already. I like that it pops out a separate window that I can do with what I please rather than being limited to whatever window management functionality they decide to add to their internal "window".
    - hobos_delight 6y ago
      Possibly - but in my case the windows was just floating on top of all of my other windows, and whilst I could move and resize it, I could not move it like other windows. So popping out a new firefox window that operates like a normal window would be great, but the current solution seems like the worst of both worlds. Also on an unrelated note, seeing your username we used to work together - hope all is going well :)
      - kevincox 6y ago
        Ah, that is weird. The window behaved fairly normally for me. (I'm on Linux Wayland)
stuaxo 6y ago
The only thing is its easy to forget which tab it came from. I put it on top and then on all desktops and change desktops with it. Sometimes I come back and close some tab and it happens to be the parent of the video I'm watching.
naktinis 6y ago
It may be a nice feature, but for me Firefox's implementation seems to be a bit too intrusive, because as a developer I can't disable it and it is always visible as a browser-styled overlay. Not all video elements are for stand-alone consumption. For example, there are "hero" videos in landing pages, enterprise solutions requiring smart overlays, or imagine a component in an online video editor. Firefox also have no plans to support the Picutre-in-picture web API: https://www.w3.org/TR/picture-in-picture/ https://www.w3.org/TR/picture-in-picture/. See, for example, this bugzilla issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1611831 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1611831
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
rsapkf 6y ago
PiP is such a useful feature. Even though I use a window manager, I like the fact that I can just take whatever video is playing out from my current tab and move it over to my programming workspace and follow a tutorial or something. No need to create a new window. When I'm done, I can put it right back to the original tab on the original workspace with a single click. Especially useful with floating mode enabled.
kbenson 6y ago
While I really like this functionality, I can't seem to find any way to change the area the picture shows up. I do not want it in the bottom right, because I get OS messages there (maybe that's how they implemented it and why it's there?), and I suspect either they will be covered up or cover up the picture (a problem I often have with some apps in that location when I get messages). Just being able to change which corner it was in (like many PIP televisions allow) would be amazingly useful.
xadz 6y ago
I've been using this in Chrome for Mac in YouTube for a while. It is in Safari too. Just have to double right click a YouTube video to get the browser menu instead of the YouTube one.
t0astbread 6y ago
PiP is a cool feature but I've recently found another way to "stream" video from the web which is now pretty much my default: For a lot of sites you can either curl or youtube-dl the video to a file and thanks to the way encodings and container formats work you can just play the file back using your favorite media player while the download is still in progress. You can't seek past the download head unfortunately but the playback you get is much more pleasant (and for some reason also faster?) than say, on YouTube.
- tartoran 6y ago
  I use it directly from VLC when I need to boost up the sound a few db beyond the original threshold
  - t0astbread 6y ago
    Wait, VLC has a youtube-dl integration?
    - pfundstein 6y ago
      No.. VLC can play most streaming formats & protocols from network sources. Open VLC, press Ctrl+N and paste the URL.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      mpv does, if that's what you're looking for.
      - t0astbread 6y ago
        Oh that's nice! I was actually already using mpv for playback but I never noticed this feature. The only disadvantage this has over my stitched together setup is that I don't get to keep the video afterwards but it fixes a lot of pain points.
        thaumasiotes 6y ago
huxflux 6y ago
PiP made Firefox complete!
AjithAntony 6y ago
FYI, General purpose "PiP" tool for windows. https://github.com/LorenzCK/OnTopReplica https://github.com/LorenzCK/OnTopReplica
OnlyRepliesToBS 6y ago
the IE6 era all over again
winrid 6y ago
FF is getting better, and it seems Chrome has started to frequently lock up in some of my devices...
Jaruzel 6y ago
I like having a floating YouTube video on my desktop while I work so much that I knocked up this simple solution a few years ago: http://www.jaruzel.com/apps/youtube/ http://www.jaruzel.com/apps/youtube/ (Select 'View (New Window)') It suits me, and gets used lots. I've never bothered to look, but I reckon there's probably a Chrome extension that also does the same.

251 points by raldu 6y ago

This is great. Will it work with Netflix videos in the browser? The always on top is a nice feature for this kind of thing

maxwellito 6y ago
Yes! It works with any video tag. I just tried it with Netflix, it works like a charm!
beirut_bootleg 6y ago
It does work with Netflix. Unfortunately you won't get any subtitles.

jackson1442 6y ago

I've been using it with their Dev Edition and it works very nicely for me. On a Mac, it blends in with the design language, and works on just about any video, even video that's been DRM'd to hell and back (Netflix, Hulu, etc).

hasbot 6y ago

I've been using this a lot lately for YouTube videos so I can watch a video and keep web surfing. Works great, though the PiP doesn't have all the controls (e.g. volume and seek).

stronglikedan 6y ago
The amount of video/audio player clients in general that don't have a seek function is, quite frankly, astonishing to me.
0-_-0 6y ago
Even the youtube shortcuts don't work (J/L for long seek and left/right for short seek)

dsego 6y ago

What's new here? I've been under the impression this existed for a while. Does it finally provide the standard video controls?

nanna 6y ago

Must admit I've noticed the blue Picture-in-Picture but never thought to click on it. Didn't at all occur to me what it did.

bentcorner 6y ago

PiP is such a great feature. I have no idea how easy/hard it was to implement but it feels nice to use. It does exactly what you'd expect it to do and nothing more. I use it while watching overwatch league games in the browser because it allows me to resize the popped-out video arbitrarily, instead of the site's embedded youtube player options of either tiny-window-in-browser or full-screen sizes (there is no theater mode in the embedded player for some reason).

zozos 6y ago
Same. It's great.
ashconnor 6y ago
It works better than the native support on OSX. A lot of videos I watch on Safari don't show the PIP button but work fine on Firefox.
- mikewhy 6y ago
  In Safari, you can right-click the speaker icon in the tab or address bar, and there's a PIP option in the menu. Not as accessible as Firefox for sure.
  - mthoms 6y ago
    Good to know, thanks. I suspect right click doesn't work when there's a transparent div over the video.
    - mikewhy 6y ago
      Luckily this is all in the browser's UI, nothing a webpage can do to block that.
  - cstuder 6y ago
    Well, that's exceptionally well hidden. Thank you for the tip.

tushar-r 6y ago

This is brilliant! I've been looking for a replacement for Helium on Windows and this seems to be it!

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

detaro 6y ago

Mozilla Tech Blog from January on implementing it: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/01/how-we-built-picture-in-picture-in-firefox-desktop/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/01/how-we-built-picture-in-pi... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22283386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22283386)

kords 6y ago

I've tried it, it's awesome. The things I'm missing in that new window are progress bar and volume control. Or at least I haven't seen a way to make them visible.

staycoolboy 6y ago

I've been using this since it was launched and I constantly forget that I need to keep the browser tab open for PIP to work. Doh. Would be cool if the PiP window was another instance of the native window with its zero-decor.

classics2 6y ago

YouTube charges for this “feature”. How will that go over?

dhritzkiv 6y ago
They do? As in, paying will expose a control on their player to enter PiP in supported platforms? Note: other than FF, you can also trigger PiP (edit: on Safari) on a YouTube video by double-right-clicking on the video element OR long pressing on the speaker icon on the tab/address bar.
- recursive 6y ago
  > other than FF, you can also trigger PiP on a YouTube video by double-right-clicking on the video element OR long pressing on the speaker icon on the tab/address bar. Neither of these worked for me. Chrome 83 on Win 10.
  - dhritzkiv 6y ago
    Oops - sorry! I forgot to include the important bit about Safari on macOS. Updated my comment.
- input_sh 6y ago
  YouTube app on Android supported this some time ago. If you were playing a video and then wanted to go to some other app, a small floating window appeared with that video playing. It was then locked away behind YouTube Premium, and now YouTube (non-premium) occasionally bugs you to pay for the premium when you try switching to another app so that you can continue playback.
- chadcmulligan 6y ago
  > YouTube video by double-right-clicking on the video element OR long pressing on the speaker icon on the tab/address bar. I've been using pipifier for this - especially for Netflix, didn't know about this until now - thanks
recursive 6y ago

jdlyga 6y ago

Doesn't Chrome do this too? If you click the music button in the toolbar, you can pop out a video to an always-on-top window that you can watch overtop of other apps.

yuchi 6y ago

«Toddler duty» is a fantastic marketing approach to the feature! (While I usually deprecate using videos to entertain toddlers and kids, using it to have them close to you looks… good I guess)

fulafel 6y ago

This is normally a window manager feature, why put it in browser where it's limited to browser tabs?

slipheen 6y ago
I'm not sure I understand what you mean about browser tabs. This pops the video outside of the browser's chrome, so you can drag it wherever you want. They implemented it in Firefox because Firefox is the one detecting and playing the video? MacOS already has a similar feature, but AFAIK it only works in Safari.
- fulafel 6y ago
  I mean it's limited to content managed by the browser, whereas the native WM way works for all apps.
  - slipheen 6y ago
    I guess I don't know enough about how WMs work. :( I'm curious how the WM could detect that the a portion of a window is playing video, and break that out into it's own movable window? I'm not sure how you do that without the browser managing that.
    - TD-Linux 6y ago
      It can't. (on some platforms, the video ends up on a compositor subsurface, but so can many other portions of an app so trying to make a PiP feature out of that would probably not work well)
    - fulafel 6y ago
      But you don't want it to be limited to plain video players - videoconferencing apps, games, and various real-time data displays etc are good fits to pip too. You are able to pipify any window without the app having to explicitly support it.

ozaark 6y ago

Opera has had this feature for years and features more playback controls than FF. It seems many features start on Opera then get "invented" in other browsers afterwards.

ozaark 6y ago
Downvoted for providing a relevant fact as well as an observation? Gee thanks
- thephyber 6y ago
  I didn't downvote but I considered it. The second sentence was unnecessary and almost snide.
forgotpwd16 6y ago
You're right that it has been in Opera for years. Specifically it was introduced back in 2016. But Maxthon had it first, introducing it in 2010. Snaps or webpage screenshoting as well (2010), which was later put in Opera (2017) and recently on Firefox.

bvm 6y ago

I love PiP but I wish it worked for multiple videos simultaneously on desktop.

tedmiston 6y ago
That sounds potentially interesting. Do you have a specific use case in mind?
- bvm 6y ago
  yeh! I like watching rocket launches from multiple camera angles! And i watch a lot of simracing with multiple streamers streaming the same race.
  - ta17711771 6y ago
    VLC
numpad0 6y ago
I just snap off the tabs and hang them on 4th and 5th monitors... then I forget having them and the vehicle is already past Max Q.

WmyEE0UsWAwC2i 6y ago

This is a nice feature. > play alongside while you go about your business on > other tabs or do things outside of Firefox. Do we need to watch video while we go about our business? You better finish your business or the video. Which leaves me thinking: this is kind of bloat.

WmyEE0UsWAwC2i 6y ago
And this is why HN should't have implemented angry-vote.
- WmyEE0UsWAwC2i 6y ago
  You are angry because it's true.
art4ur 6y ago
It doesn't feel like bloat to me. It makes my experience better.
saagarjha 6y ago
> Do we need to watch video while we go about our business? You better finish your business or the video. Yes, and don't tell me how to do my work.

brospars 6y ago

Wait this is not new is it ? Ive beenm using it for the past 6 months at least...

ckcheng 6y ago
Yeah, I've been able to use it for months (FF on Mac)... Was it rolled out to certain computers for testing before?
- 00deadbeef 6y ago
  Same here. FF on Mac. I’ve been using it since lockdown began in the UK in March. It’s been really handy to keep BBC News in the corner of the screen when the Government was doing daily briefings.
- Izkata 6y ago
  Firefox on Ubuntu here, also for months at least - don't remember when exactly though.
jakemal 6y ago
The linked article was posted on January 6th, 2020. For some reason many people received an email about it today. Must have just been a soft rollout and now they are starting to actually publicize the feature?

sylens 6y ago

This seems like a massive feature that I can't believe hasn't been baked into Chrome yet. I know Safari has an implementation but it always feels limited and of course cannot be used on Windows or Linux. I need to put this through its paces, but it may vault Firefox back into the role of my default browser.

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
While it is truly a nice feature, it is hardly the main reason why should anyone concerned with the future of the web use Firefox as default browser.
- huxflux 6y ago
  Actually, this is the main reason why I had Opera installed on three computers for three years. All uninstalled now.
CryZe 6y ago
Chrome has this as well. However it's kinda hidden (in that you need to trigger it from JavaScript / need an extension to trigger it for you).
forgotpwd16 6y ago
Chrome has it for about two years now, since ver. 70. On a Youtube video right-click twice and click "Picture in picture".
- tedmiston 6y ago
  I don't seem to have a "Picture in picture" option in the context menu on an arbitrary YouTube video on Chrome 84 beta on macOS. But there is a PiP button in the "hamburger with musical note" menu in the toolbar. It seems Google has an optional PiP Chrome extension as well. It looks like it just makes the button more visible. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/picture-in-picture-extens/hkgfoiooedgoejojocmhlaklaeopbecg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/picture-in-picture...

raspyberr 6y ago

I'm sure this works great but I've been using MPV/youtube-dl for a while now and I don't think this will cause me to switch.

phkahler 6y ago

This should be more of a desktop feature. I'd like to play video wallpaper on gnome/wayland for example. I think this is as much on the desktop devs as the browser devs, if not moreso.

51Cards 6y ago

I use this feature on a daily basis, in fact it's running right now. I have a few UI issues with it, the resize border is much too hard to hit, it would be nice to be able to click the video to pause, and I would like to see a progress bar and mute buttons. That said it has already been a "game changer" for how I view video every day.

anotheryou 6y ago

I want a "fullscreen to second screen" option for it (also without allways on top than)

kords 6y ago
I use double-click for fullscreen, but yeah, it will go on top.

os7borne 6y ago

PiP is so functional and I've been using it for sometime now.

pixelatedindex 6y ago

It's too bad that YouTube subtitles still show up in the main YT page and is not present in the PiP modal.

suzakus 6y ago
This is a technical restriction with PIP not allowing for elements to be drawn in the PiP modal (or more specifically; HTMLVideoElement is the only thing that can be PiPed currently)

dingaling 6y ago

This would be great for PiPing a general webpage rather than just a video. Instead of tearing-off a tab, resizing its window and pinning it always-on-top to use as a reference.

avian 6y ago

Is anyone else annoyed that Mozilla chose to spam them with an ad for this new feature via the email address they received when creating the Firefox sync account? Is this really such an important thing that warrants sending an unsolicited message to every Firefox user's inbox? Yes, the footer says "You're receiving this email because .. is subscribed to Firefox Account Tips." and indeed I can now see that setting in my Firefox account. I'm sure that checkbox popped up sometime after I created the account and was conveniently set to "true" by default.

anonymousab 6y ago
There's also conveniently a new category whenever they want to make sure everyone has to be bothered by the newest junk. Or a very slight rename of an existing one, but hey, that means they get to ignore the previous setting. To me, such sleazy tactics are simply a deep admission of failure.
wonderlg 6y ago
Things like this make it hard to take Firefox’ stand on privacy seriously. They keep making “mistakes” like this all the time unapologetically. I marked the email as spam because that’s what it is.
james412 6y ago
The horror
- 65536 6y ago
  Email is a dumpster fire. I run my own mail server and I don’t have any spam filtering. My inbox is full of spam and “helpful tips” and other garbage. Because of this I rarely read my email. I would set up spam filtering but I don’t trust SpamAssasin to actually be useful rather than just another headache, because last time I was on a system where it was in use it routinely marked non-spam things as spam while simultaneously letting through a whole lot of spam. Admittedly this was years ago. I did find Paul Graham’s essay on spam filtering inspiring and thought about doing something like that for myself. But although I have a huge corpus of spam, I don’t have a whole lot of non-spam because I don’t receive a lot of non-spam. Spam is also annoying and uninspiring to do anything about because it is just yet another of the billions of problems that we have that were caused by other people being inconsiderate dicks :( It currently feels like almost all problems that I could work on should not have existed in the first place and are only there because of us all being the way that we are.

knasmai 6y ago

I love PiP and it's def great in WFH situation where I can just have YouTube videos playing on the side. If anyone from Mozilla is reading this, one thing I wish Firefox did was to allow us to make it sticky to the corner like Safari does on MacOS. I think just throwing the PiP window to a corner and expecting it to be there is subtle difference but makes the overall experience much simpler. I don't having to decide where exactly to position the video and keep moving it little by little. Also, if I push the Safari PiP video against the edge of the screen, it simply collapses. That's helpful when the video is blocking something I care about and I need to quickly hide it. Again, simpler experience than allowing free form movement for my workflow.

saagarjha 6y ago
Yeah, sadly Firefox doesn't use the native PiP implementation :(

actionowl 6y ago

I'm really surprised to see how many people appreciate this feature. I've tried to use it many times but I've found that when I'm watching a video I either want to give it my full(screen) attention (movie, entertainment) or have it in the background entirely (music, news, podcast.) I've personally not found a use for it and end up closing it after about 5-10 minutes.

SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
I like more than thought I would. I can keep going through tabs without losing the video. The problem for me is it doesn’t have controls past pause and play. If I want to back the video up or skip it forward I need to go figure out which tab it’s coming from, and I can’t remember if I have to unpop to get controls. Windows 10, ymmv.
- avery42 6y ago
  This also annoys me. Even just allowing arrow keys to seek back and forth would be enough for now.
  - CanisDirus 6y ago
    That can be enabled with media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.keyboard-controls.enabled toggle in about:config.
    - avery42 6y ago
      Woah that's perfect, thank you!
  - childintime 6y ago
    Also, the controls have changed: a single click doesn't pause the window as it normally does. Why change?? :/
SECProto 6y ago
i use it when i'm watching a youtube or other video that has interesting parts, but also lots of fluff. PiP lets me do other things and mostly ignore the fluff

gbolcer 6y ago

There are a couple of sites that auto-started video and when you scrolled down, automatically did picture-in-picture. In fact I think Facebook even experimented with it for a while. The problem with those implementations was that the user had no control over which videos, nor the ability to prevent them from displaying. It took a heavy amount of NoScript isolation to prevent it from happening. I always thought it would be useful if someone would write something that put the user back in control.

xmichael0 6y ago

Opera has been doing this for years...

etempleton 6y ago

This is a great feature and I love Firefox and what Mozilla stands for, but I have recently switched to Edge because of how hard my CPU is hit when I watch YouTube videos in Firefox. I understand that this is not entirely within the control of Mozilla and the Firefox team, but it became such an issue on my current machine, which is admittedly quite old, that I felt forced to make the switch.

aaron695 6y ago

If we are going to destroy our brains we might as do it well!

thamer 6y ago

For Chromium-based browsers (I used it in Brave but it should work with all of them), create a new bookmark and set this as the URL: javascript:document.querySelector('video').requestPictureInPicture() It works on YouTube, Twitch, HBO Now, Netflix, probably others too. I keep it in my Bookmarks Bar for quick access, I hope others here will find it useful!

somishere 6y ago

I've been enjoying this for a while on the beta channel, however subs/captions are very noticeably absent. Unsure if it's all <tracks> or just those not using the built-in api for display. Needless to say custom caption implementations are extremely common due to the discrepancies in display between browsers.

bondolo 6y ago

I am glad it can be disabled globally easily. YMMV

kgwxd 6y ago

Have other hardcore anti-autoplay users noticed some autoplay getting through as of the last update? I've had it at the highest possible settings for a long time and nothing ever got through, now something is different. It not all the time, but often enough that it bugs me.

chrysoprace 6y ago

I really love this feature and I hope that it receives more love and polish in the future. It's unfortunately unusable with foreign language videos as the subtitles don't pop out with the video. Not sure if this is due to the lack of such an API, or if the major video providers (Netflix, YouTube, etc.) simply haven't implemented it. My other wishlist feature is to have rewind/forward controls natively in the PIP window.

suzakus 6y ago
Unless the captions are burned in, currently you cannot have the captions show up in the PiP video due to the API restrictions. It's mentioned in the proposal doc here: https://www.w3.org/TR/picture-in-picture/#security-considerations https://www.w3.org/TR/picture-in-picture/#security-considera...
- chrysoprace 6y ago
  Thank you. I was trying to find information on this, but all I found was this bugzilla post: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1551058 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1551058

kevincox 6y ago

I wish it worked by using the regular web fullscreen API to pop out. Instead of going fullscreen it would just spawn a chromeless window that I can position anywhere I want and control using my regular window manager controls. As an advantage this would give sites full control over the content including having the full video (or other content) controls instead of just play which is what Firefox PiP gives you.

hobos_delight 6y ago
I completely agree - I use i3 and was interested to see that this just pops up a floating window over all of my others. When reading the feature my thought was that it would be a floating window _within_ the browser window - which I think I would have preferred.
- kevincox 6y ago
  I disagree with that. The browser already does too much "window management" already. I like that it pops out a separate window that I can do with what I please rather than being limited to whatever window management functionality they decide to add to their internal "window".
  - hobos_delight 6y ago
    Possibly - but in my case the windows was just floating on top of all of my other windows, and whilst I could move and resize it, I could not move it like other windows. So popping out a new firefox window that operates like a normal window would be great, but the current solution seems like the worst of both worlds. Also on an unrelated note, seeing your username we used to work together - hope all is going well :)
    - kevincox 6y ago
      Ah, that is weird. The window behaved fairly normally for me. (I'm on Linux Wayland)

stuaxo 6y ago

The only thing is its easy to forget which tab it came from. I put it on top and then on all desktops and change desktops with it. Sometimes I come back and close some tab and it happens to be the parent of the video I'm watching.

naktinis 6y ago

It may be a nice feature, but for me Firefox's implementation seems to be a bit too intrusive, because as a developer I can't disable it and it is always visible as a browser-styled overlay. Not all video elements are for stand-alone consumption. For example, there are "hero" videos in landing pages, enterprise solutions requiring smart overlays, or imagine a component in an online video editor. Firefox also have no plans to support the Picutre-in-picture web API: https://www.w3.org/TR/picture-in-picture/ https://www.w3.org/TR/picture-in-picture/. See, for example, this bugzilla issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1611831 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1611831

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

rsapkf 6y ago

PiP is such a useful feature. Even though I use a window manager, I like the fact that I can just take whatever video is playing out from my current tab and move it over to my programming workspace and follow a tutorial or something. No need to create a new window. When I'm done, I can put it right back to the original tab on the original workspace with a single click. Especially useful with floating mode enabled.

kbenson 6y ago

While I really like this functionality, I can't seem to find any way to change the area the picture shows up. I do not want it in the bottom right, because I get OS messages there (maybe that's how they implemented it and why it's there?), and I suspect either they will be covered up or cover up the picture (a problem I often have with some apps in that location when I get messages). Just being able to change which corner it was in (like many PIP televisions allow) would be amazingly useful.

xadz 6y ago

I've been using this in Chrome for Mac in YouTube for a while. It is in Safari too. Just have to double right click a YouTube video to get the browser menu instead of the YouTube one.

t0astbread 6y ago

PiP is a cool feature but I've recently found another way to "stream" video from the web which is now pretty much my default: For a lot of sites you can either curl or youtube-dl the video to a file and thanks to the way encodings and container formats work you can just play the file back using your favorite media player while the download is still in progress. You can't seek past the download head unfortunately but the playback you get is much more pleasant (and for some reason also faster?) than say, on YouTube.

tartoran 6y ago
I use it directly from VLC when I need to boost up the sound a few db beyond the original threshold
- t0astbread 6y ago
  Wait, VLC has a youtube-dl integration?
  - pfundstein 6y ago
    No.. VLC can play most streaming formats & protocols from network sources. Open VLC, press Ctrl+N and paste the URL.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    mpv does, if that's what you're looking for.
    - t0astbread 6y ago
      Oh that's nice! I was actually already using mpv for playback but I never noticed this feature. The only disadvantage this has over my stitched together setup is that I don't get to keep the video afterwards but it fixes a lot of pain points.
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago

huxflux 6y ago

PiP made Firefox complete!

AjithAntony 6y ago

FYI, General purpose "PiP" tool for windows. https://github.com/LorenzCK/OnTopReplica https://github.com/LorenzCK/OnTopReplica

OnlyRepliesToBS 6y ago

the IE6 era all over again

winrid 6y ago

FF is getting better, and it seems Chrome has started to frequently lock up in some of my devices...

Jaruzel 6y ago

I like having a floating YouTube video on my desktop while I work so much that I knocked up this simple solution a few years ago: http://www.jaruzel.com/apps/youtube/ http://www.jaruzel.com/apps/youtube/ (Select 'View (New Window)') It suits me, and gets used lots. I've never bothered to look, but I reckon there's probably a Chrome extension that also does the same.