How to Use Google Chrome’s Picture-in-Picture Mode

Chrome’s picture-in-picture mode that allows you to float videos on top of other windows is live in Chrome 70—but it’s not the most intuitive feature. In fact, it’s almost hidden in some cases.

What is Picture-in-Picture in Chrome?

Just like on your TV, picture-in-picture mode in Chrome allows you to pop a video out of the specific tab it’s currently in and float it on top of other windows. It works on Chrome for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and will put the floating window in an always-on-top state, so you can move it anywhere and keep it above other windows.

This is a nifty little feature if you’re cramped for screen real estate and still need to keep eyes on a video, but it’s also sort of a pain to find—at least on YouTube.

How to Use Chrome’s Picture-in-Picture Mode

To pop a video out of a YouTube tab and throw it on top of other windows, you need to access Chrome’s right-click menu. But if you’ve ever right-clicked on a YouTube video, you’ll know that it has its own menu, like this:

To access Chrome’s menu, you’ll need to right click a second time, which will give you this:

And there it is: “Picture in picture.” Just click that little guy and out comes the video, free to live its life outside of a browser tab. They grow up so fast.

Once pip is activated, the YouTube window where the video usually plays will go black and display the text “The video is playing in picture-in-picture mode,” as seen in the screenshot above.

To move the video out of the pip window and back into its tab, just click the little X in the upper right corner of the video.

Alternatively, you can also double right click the YouTube window again and de-select the “Picture in picture” option.

Easy peasy…once you know where to find it.

To access pip in other compatible video players, you should just need to right click once—though keep in mind this doesn’t work on every site. YouTube is probably going to be the most used scenario anyway, and now you know how to do it.