A Chrome extension to add the picture-in-picture effect from YouTube's mobile app to YouTube's main website

Jan 24, 2016 03:05 GMT  ·  By

The YouTube Picture in Picture extension for Google Chrome allows users to navigate YouTube's pages but also keep watching and listening to a video at the same time.

The extension is a perfect clone of YouTube's mobile app, which minimizes videos via a picture-in-picture effect, allowing users to search the site without stopping a video's playback.

Besides the basic picture-in-picture effect, the extension will also let users adjust the video frame's size and return to the video's page with one click.

Additionally, there's also a menu option when right-clicking another YouTube video link, which lets users replace the current clip played in the picture-in-picture floating frame.

You might think that loading a video wherever you go on the site may be a problem, but YouTube Picture in Picture works flawlessly. There was no sensible lag when navigating the site, at least there was none in our tests, and the extension didn't impede YouTube's pages from loading as fast as they previously did.

The extension is still in beta

Currently, as the extension's author says himself, the extension is in beta phase and some bugs may still exist. He explains that playlists don't load all the times inside the floating popup and that occasionally even standalone videos fail to open. When this happens, he recommends users to click the video frame, load the video page, and then go back to searching the site from there, since this fixes the issue.

Additionally, unlike the YouTube mobile app, the video does not minimize when on the clip's own page. This behavior would be useful when reading comments but also wanting to keep an eye on the video.

You can install the extension yourself, as it is already uploaded on the Google Chrome Web Store.