Try Picture in Picture mode for Firefox in Nightly

It hasn’t took much long for Mozilla to bring Chrome’s Picture in Picture to Firefox, still early days in development though, but you can test it latest Nightly version.

The company says in a meta bug that it is strictly to track “User-initiated Picture in Picture for Video”,  but not to cover implementation of PIP API. Mozilla has set three mile stones for feature, the final milestone 3, which is too far away, will make the QA to fix bugs that were found and enable the feature by default and let it ride the trains.

Firefox Picture in Picture

Picture in Picture mode in Firefox

Here is user story: “When viewing a video on the website, user should be able to “pop” that video into separate, always-on-top of window, to support background watching. ”

user initiated picture in picture for Video in Firefox Nightly

At the time of writing this, the company has completed the milestone -1, which needs to do following things

  • Add an alwaysontop Window feature to Windows version of Firefox
  • Add  simple infrastructure for opening videos in PIP window and  cloning a video stream to it.

Without ado, to test the user initiated Picture in Picture for video in Firefox

1. Ensure you’re using latest Nightly

2. Visit about:config

3. Find the following preference and change its value to true.

media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.enabled

4. Visit YouTube, play any video, right click on it twice and select ‘Picture in Picture”, voila! You can view the video on top of other windows on system.

Do note Mozilla has done Min Vid Test Pilot experiment, which is quite similar to Picture in Picture which minimizes video, but it hasn’t emerged as a feature, but they’ve shown interest on Chrome’s Picture in Picture implementation in Firefox. Check PIP implementation status in other browsers status such as Edge, Firefox and Safari here.

Related articles:

Vivaldi 2.1 adds Chrome’s Picture in Picture mode

Chrome Picture in Picture Mode vs Opera Video Pop Out

Chrome Picture-in-Picture Mode gets Back to Video tab button

Venkat Eswarlu

Venkat is an independent technology journalist and the founder of Techdows. He has been covering web browsers, Windows, and software news since 2009. His exclusive scoops on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge features have been cited by Forbes, TechCrunch, Wired, CNET, and other major publications.

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