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One of my favorite Chrome features to date is the ability to pop videos out of YouTube and elsewhere on the web and play them in a smaller window at the corner of my screen while I multitask and crush some work. This is called Picture-in-Picture mode, and to date, it’s been a pretty utilitarian feature.
Essentially, it does what it needs to do, and that’s okay. Luckily, Chrome’s development team doesn’t think that’s enough and has a grander vision for what types of content could be displayed in the PiP window. It also has some additional use cases it hopes to implement in the near future.
While the current PiP window lets you play and pause the active video, future iterations will “make it possible to open an always-on-top window that can be populated by arbitrary HTML content”. What this means is that a popped-out video call could have hand-raising and emoji reaction tools, and videos could show things like the entire video timeline so you can scrub across it without returning to the main window.
Another possibility is quick access to YouTube like and dislike buttons, full playlist navigation, a caption toggle, or even multiple video streams in one picture-in-picture window without needing to rely on canvas hacks. In some instances, it may be more beneficial to change a video’s resolution, playback speed, and more or mute a conference call participant, send a quick chat, and so on without having to fill your screen with the source window.
I see this as one of those things that you could probably live without, but now that you know about it, it will tick that box in your mind as a nice-to-have and may eventually become the standard for how you interact with video content while multitasking. Google states that this new PiP API is available as an origin trial in Chrome 111 on desktop, but of course, you’ll need to wait for developers to utilize it and implement some cool tools. I have no doubt in my mind that Google Meet and YouTube will likely be among the first to do so.
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