14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla has started testing a new feature for Firefox browser that will allow users to keep watching videos on top of other windows or right on the desktop.
Officially known as picture-in-picture mode, the new tool is already in its early in Firefox Nightly, the company’s very own testing browser that helps experiment with improvements ahead of the public launch.
However, the current implementation of picture-in-picture mode in Firefox is very limited, and I expect Mozilla to accelerate work on it as we approach its target release date. No specifics in this regard are available, however.
Already available in rival browsers
A picture-in-picture mode is already available in other browsers, like Google Chrome, which received it last year.
With this feature, you can technically watch a YouTube video on top of other windows, and you are allowed to configure settings like the size of the popup.
At this point, however, you can’t do this in Firefox, as the existing picture-in-picture feature only launches a popup that runs on top of other windows and that’s pretty much all about it. It works on YouTube just fine, and you can invoke this option by right-clicking on a playing video. There’s not even an option to close the PiP video, so you have to once again right-click it for this task.
Like Google Chrome, Vivaldi is also offering a picture-in-picture mode, and you can access it by right-clicking on a YouTube video. The popup displays a pause button on mouse hover, as well as a close button. When the video is playing in PiP mode, the main YouTube tab displays a message “This video is playing in picture-in-picture mode.” Keeping the PiP window and closing the tab isn’t possible at the moment.
It remains to be seen when this feature becomes available for users, but for now, it’s pretty clear Mozilla still has a lot of refinements to do before it gives the go-ahead.
Via TechDows