YouTube Will Soon Support Automatic Picture-in-Picture When Switching Tabs in Chrome
Picture in Picture (PiP) is a great feature for us multitaskers. Of course we have a lot to do, but there are also a lot of videos to watch. Why not kill two birds with one stone and cross off our to-do lists with a floating media player in the corner of our screens?
However, the thing about PiP is that it’s not always the most convenient feature, especially on a desktop computer. Typically, you’ll need to first learn how to activate it, which might entail a keyboard shortcut or perhaps double-right-clicking to reveal a hidden menu. If your browser or app doesn’t include a convenient shortcut, it’s often more of a hurdle than it needs to be. Compare this to how it works on mobile devices, where simply exiting the app automatically places the video in the PiP window.
This feature makes a lot of sense for PiP: typically you want to use this feature to continue watching a video while moving away from its source, so it monitors the PiP window launching itself when you switch to another window or application. In my opinion, the more platforms that accept this behavior, the better.
It’s the same with Chrome: As reported by XDA Developers , Google is actively working on a feature in its web browser that automatically launches the PiP window when exiting the YouTube tab. Although Google announced this feature back in February , it has yet to be actively made available for testing. Researcher Leopeva64 discovered this development, posting about it on X on Friday .
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How to force YouTube to automatically open in picture-in-picture mode
This feature isn’t live yet—it’s currently being tested in Google Chrome’s beta version, Chrome Canary—but in theory you should be able to try it out right now. Unfortunately, it doesn’t currently work for me, but here are possible steps you can take to try it out today:
First, you’ll need Chrome Canary, which you can download for your platform of choice here . Then go to chrome://flags and search for picture-in-picture. There are two relevant flags here: ” Browser initiated automatic picture-in-picture ” and ” Automatic picture-in-picture for video playback .” You can try enabling both to get this feature to work, but again, neither of them are making it work on my end yet.
Then open YouTube and click the settings button to the left of the URL. Select Site Settings and scroll down to Automatic Picture-in-Picture . By default, it should be set to “Ask “, which will force the site to ask you every session if you want to use picture-in-picture, but you can select “Allow” to enable picture-in-picture every time.
Now start playing the video and switch tabs. If this feature works on your end, it should automatically display the PiP window when you leave the YouTube tab. If the setting is set to Ask , you will need to approve the window’s permissions before it starts playing.
This feature may not be for everyone. In this case, you can completely disable it on the same settings page by selecting Block .