When you're watching a video from a site, such as YouTube, you might want to do something else and navigate to other tabs while not missing out on what you were watching. That's where picture-in-picture comes in handy as it allows the video to be pushed to a mini-player on your screen so you can do other stuff.

The feature has been in the works for the Chrome browser for a while and is enabled by default as of version 70 for Mac, Windows, and Linux. For Chrome OS, you'd need to manually set a flag to enable picture-in-picture, which didn't always work. That doesn't seem necessary anymore as a Google extension (of all things) brings support for PIP on Chrome OS v72.

You'll need to be running the v72 Beta build of Chrome OS to try it out. The extension probably also works in the Dev and Canary channels of Chrome OS, though we haven't verified that, and will come to stable once v72 graduates. If you are planning on jumping to the Beta build, be sure to back up your data.

With the extension installed, picture-in-picture can be triggered with the keyboard shortcut Alt+P or by pressing its icon in the top right of your browser.

It seems strange why Google wouldn't natively bake the feature into Chrome as it has across other platforms, but could be to test things out. The dependency may disappear as v72 progresses to the stable channel but, for now, head on over to the Chrome Web Store to download the Picture-in-Picture extension and enjoy pretending to work while watching YouTube.

Source: Chrome Web Store

Via: Chrome Unboxed