It hasn’t taken 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 the implementation of PIP API. Mozilla has set three mile stones for the 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.
The picture in Picture mode in Firefox
Here is the user story: “When viewing a video on the website, the user should be able to “pop” that video into separate, always-on-top of window, to support background watching. ”
At the time of writing this, the company has completed the milestone -1, which needs to do the 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.
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 the 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.
March 05, 2019 Update: Audio is now working for videos in Picture in Picture mode in latest Firefox Nighty, which was not the case before when we covered.
March 14, 2019 Update: Firefox now displays a message in main video that this video is playing in Picture in Picture mode.
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
Not even remotely interested. I have already uninstalled Firefox for limiting my freedom of choice on my Homepage.