Lets users watch videos in a floating window

Oct 19, 2018 14:41 GMT  ·  By

Chromium evanghelist at Google François Beaufort announced today that Picture-in-Picture (PiP) support is now enabled by defualt in the Google Chrome web browser for Linux, Mac, and Windows platforms.

Google's engineers have been working for months to add Picture-in-Picture (PiP) support to the Google Chrome web browser, but the long-anticipated feature is finally here, enabled by default in the latest version for Linux, Mac, and Windows operating systems. The feature lets you detach a video in a floating window so you can watch it while doing something else on your computer.

"After months of work, I'm proud to share with all of you that Picture-in-Picture (PiP) is now enabled by default in Chrome for Linux, Mac, and Windows," said François Beaufort. "This allows you to watch videos in a floating window (always on top of other windows) so that you can keep an eye on what you're watching while interacting with other sites, or applications. I love it!"

Picture-in-Picture (PiP) in Google Chrome works only on websites that implement this feature in their media player, but it can be enabled on any website with the Picture-in-Picture extension created by François Beaufort. For YouTube videos, Chrome users will have to right-click twice on the playing video and choose the "Picture in picture" option.

Picture-in-Picture support is coming to Chrome OS and Android soon

Google enabled the Picture-in-Picture feature by default only on desktop platforms, including Linux, Mac, and Windows, but said that it's coming soon to its Chromebook operating system Chrome OS, as well as on Chrome for Android. However, Chrome OS users can now enable PiP support with the chrome://flags/#enable-surfaces-for-videos flag in chrome://flags.

The Google Chrome web browser is currently at version 70, a release that arrives just last week with a new sign-in process, improved support for PWA (Progressive Web Apps), a new Material Design-based search widget for Android, a new Downloads menu, as well as numerous security fixes. You can download Google Chrome 70 for Linux, Mac, and Windows right now through our web portal.