7 ms·

I never understood this feature either. I can already make multiple browser windows if I want. Definitely not interested in PIP.

matsemann 6y ago
I like that I can scale the video as I want. Like on a news-site the only options are often a small inline viewer or full screen. So I use PIP often for that even though I'm staying on the page. And it's just more convenient than trying to maximize the space of another browser window and making it stay put above other stuff. No extra chrome, no wasted inline space on the page. I can just take a Blender tutorial for instance and move directly above my Blender window and it obscures as little as possible.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
Browser windows have decorations that take space. I don't use PIP often, but it comes in handy when I have limited screen real estate, like watching Netflix on my sidearm in tablet mode, while simultaneously doing something on the web.
- amelius 6y ago
  This is something better solved at the window manager level. E.g. what if I want to have a PIP in my Xterm?
  - ubercow13 6y ago
    How does a window manager get rid of Firefox's browser chrome?
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Answer: it doesn't. The problem is browsers have two layers of decoration: the WM layer (which tiling window managers tend to remove), and the internal layer - the tab bar, address bar, option buttons, borders, etc. As far as I know, there isn't a way to remove all that without going full screen.
      - Macha 6y ago
        In the very first version of firefox with full screen mode it ended up doing just that, rendering full screen inside a normal window area in my tiling WM. It was likely a bug/unimplemented feature at that stage, but to be honest it would have been nice to have as an option prior to pip.
    - vifon 6y ago
      For me it makes the fullscreen videos cover only the Firefox window, so they effectively can serve as PIP windows. To be honest, I have no idea how to enable it outside of XMonad, it just worked like this on XMonad many years ago when I switched to it and I actually liked this behavior so here we are.
      - ubercow13 6y ago
        Right but xmonad is very idiosyncratic in that behaviour. I don't know of any other window manager that behaves like that, and while it seems useful in Firefox, it doesn't make much sense to ignore fullscreen requests from an application like mpv which has no chrome anyway, or say a video game which expects to be fullscreen and doesn't know how to dynamically scale its UI down when the window isn't the size it expects. PiP seems to be a cleaner solution.
  - wongarsu 6y ago
    Sure, if you have a window manager that solves the problem that's great. The rest of the world can use Firefox's inferior integration while they wait for their window manager to get that feature.
_ph_ 6y ago
Most web pages only support two video sizes: 1. unusably small 2. full screen. Which often means unusably large (27" screen), especially for less-than-HD videos At least youtube added at some time the cinema mode which allowed the video to occupy the whole window width, that is what I use most of the time. Still, PIP also has the advantage of removing the window decorations, so saving space. Also, they are floating on top of all other windows, which helps, but also occasionally can be annoying.
acdha 6y ago
I shared the initial reaction the first time I heard about it but completely changed my mind after using it. The big win is for poorly designed sites like YouTube which use non-standard controls and waste a significant majority of the space. I have hot keys to resize windows to screen quarters or halves but for anything less than full screen on my laptop a YouTube video will have less than half of the window devoted to the actual content and the browser chrome will reduce that even further. If there’s something I’m watching but not giving my full attention to - say an event hasn’t started yet or someone will be landing a rover on Mars in an hour - this means that I can either have a big chunk of my screen wasted or I can use PiP and have just the thing I care about using a quarter of the space but showing considerably more of the actual content. Plus, it uses well-tested standard controls so I don’t have to play games figuring out whose <script> kiddies don’t think about keyboard shortcuts or test their event handlers.
astura 6y ago
Following along with a tutorial would be a big use case.
SubiculumCode 6y ago
PIP also has pin-on-top feature, I believe letting you place the video in a corner over an expanded, in-focus application.

matsemann 6y ago

I like that I can scale the video as I want. Like on a news-site the only options are often a small inline viewer or full screen. So I use PIP often for that even though I'm staying on the page. And it's just more convenient than trying to maximize the space of another browser window and making it stay put above other stuff. No extra chrome, no wasted inline space on the page. I can just take a Blender tutorial for instance and move directly above my Blender window and it obscures as little as possible.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

Browser windows have decorations that take space. I don't use PIP often, but it comes in handy when I have limited screen real estate, like watching Netflix on my sidearm in tablet mode, while simultaneously doing something on the web.

amelius 6y ago
This is something better solved at the window manager level. E.g. what if I want to have a PIP in my Xterm?
- ubercow13 6y ago
  How does a window manager get rid of Firefox's browser chrome?
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Answer: it doesn't. The problem is browsers have two layers of decoration: the WM layer (which tiling window managers tend to remove), and the internal layer - the tab bar, address bar, option buttons, borders, etc. As far as I know, there isn't a way to remove all that without going full screen.
    - Macha 6y ago
      In the very first version of firefox with full screen mode it ended up doing just that, rendering full screen inside a normal window area in my tiling WM. It was likely a bug/unimplemented feature at that stage, but to be honest it would have been nice to have as an option prior to pip.
  - vifon 6y ago
    For me it makes the fullscreen videos cover only the Firefox window, so they effectively can serve as PIP windows. To be honest, I have no idea how to enable it outside of XMonad, it just worked like this on XMonad many years ago when I switched to it and I actually liked this behavior so here we are.
    - ubercow13 6y ago
      Right but xmonad is very idiosyncratic in that behaviour. I don't know of any other window manager that behaves like that, and while it seems useful in Firefox, it doesn't make much sense to ignore fullscreen requests from an application like mpv which has no chrome anyway, or say a video game which expects to be fullscreen and doesn't know how to dynamically scale its UI down when the window isn't the size it expects. PiP seems to be a cleaner solution.
- wongarsu 6y ago
  Sure, if you have a window manager that solves the problem that's great. The rest of the world can use Firefox's inferior integration while they wait for their window manager to get that feature.

_ph_ 6y ago

Most web pages only support two video sizes: 1. unusably small 2. full screen. Which often means unusably large (27" screen), especially for less-than-HD videos At least youtube added at some time the cinema mode which allowed the video to occupy the whole window width, that is what I use most of the time. Still, PIP also has the advantage of removing the window decorations, so saving space. Also, they are floating on top of all other windows, which helps, but also occasionally can be annoying.

acdha 6y ago

I shared the initial reaction the first time I heard about it but completely changed my mind after using it. The big win is for poorly designed sites like YouTube which use non-standard controls and waste a significant majority of the space. I have hot keys to resize windows to screen quarters or halves but for anything less than full screen on my laptop a YouTube video will have less than half of the window devoted to the actual content and the browser chrome will reduce that even further. If there’s something I’m watching but not giving my full attention to - say an event hasn’t started yet or someone will be landing a rover on Mars in an hour - this means that I can either have a big chunk of my screen wasted or I can use PiP and have just the thing I care about using a quarter of the space but showing considerably more of the actual content. Plus, it uses well-tested standard controls so I don’t have to play games figuring out whose <script> kiddies don’t think about keyboard shortcuts or test their event handlers.

astura 6y ago

Following along with a tutorial would be a big use case.

SubiculumCode 6y ago

PIP also has pin-on-top feature, I believe letting you place the video in a corner over an expanded, in-focus application.