Google Chrome is getting an automatic picture-in-picture mode

Google plans to roll out an automatic picture-in-picture mode in Chrome 134. The browser will be released next month. When it does, Chrome may continue to show video content on certain sites when the user scrolls away from the video content.

This feature works for the most part identical to that of Mozilla Firefox, which has had the feature for some time now.

Google has added a few safeguards to the feature. In particular, automatic picture-in-picture kicks only in if..

• The site uses a secure connection (https).
• Media is playing in the active window / tab.
• Media played with sound for at least two seconds.
• The media player needs to have set a handler for picture-in-picture.
• Google uses heuristics next to that using media engagement, unless you explicitly allow a site to enable the mode.

Chrome users may allow or disallow automatic picture-in-picture mode, which gives them control over the feature.

Enable or disable Chrome’s auto picture-in-picture feature

You can give it a try in Chrome 134 or newer by following these instructions:

1. Load chrome://flags/#auto-picture-in-picture-for-video-playback in the Chrome 134 or newer address bar.
2. Set the value of the feature to enabled.
3. Restart Google Chrome.

Note: the feature won’t be available on all sites at the time of writing. It does not work on YouTube for instance.

If you do not need the feature, you could set the value of the experimental flag to disabled to block it. This flag will be removed in the future though, which means that you do need to make changes to the settings in Chrome at that point to disable automatic picture-in-picture mode in Google Chrome.

Since it launches in Chrome, it is likely that it will also launch in other Chromium-based browsers in the future.

What is your take on this feature in general? Do you use it in another browser already? Feel free to leave a comment down below.