How to use Chrome picture in picture mode

Picture in picture mode is useful and Chrome’s just added it. You can now play most videos in a floating player outside of Chrome. This is a feature that was added in Chrome 70 so if you haven’t updated your browser just yet, this is a good reason to. Here’s how you can use Chrome picture in picture mode.

Chrome picture in picture mode

The Chrome picture in picture mode works most reliably on YouTube but it ought to, on principal, work on other websites as well. It didn’t seem to work on Facebook but there’s a solution for that.

Open a YouTube video and right-click on the player. This will open the video’s context menu which is not what you need. Right-click a second time on the video player and you will see  a different menu altogether. Select the Picture in picture option.

This will open the video in a floating player that you can drag to any corner of your screen. You should not close the original tab that you opened the video from. You will notice that the tab shows you the video is playing in Picture in Picture mode.

Now if this isn’t working on some websites, you can fix it with an extension called Picture-in-Picture. Install it from the Chrome web store. Open the website that picture in picture won’t work on. Play the video, and then click the extension’s icon next to the URL bar. This ought to play the video in picture in picture mode though, since you used the extension to enable it, the video will continue to play in the original tab. That means you will have two versions of the video playing and you will need to manually pause it in the tab.

This is a pretty impressive new feature. Safari has had it for a while but Safari, as a browser, works only on macOS whereas Chrome is available for both macOS and Windows.

If you don’t see the Picture in picture option in the context menu, you might want to resize the Chrome window so that it isn’t maximized. That ought to do the trick. The video will be pinned to the top of your desktop which means it will also obscure any apps that you’re using. You can pause the video from the floating video player. You can also resize the floating player to a considerably large size.

If you like Chrome’s picture in picture mode, you should check out Compact View which lets you use Windows 10’s mini view for almost any video player.