With macOS Sierra, Apple introduced Picture-in-Picture mode for Safari. While the feature is definitely handy, Safari is not widely used by everyone despite it being faster and more resource efficient. Most Mac users primarily use Chrome as the browser of their choice for all the features it offers.
Sadly, Google has not yet implemented Picture-in-Picture support in Chrome which is a bit disappointing. On the bright side, the company is working on bringing this feature to its browser across all platforms, and while the feature is not yet ready for primetime, you can still enable it if you wish to.
You will have to install the Canary build of Chrome for this which comes with its own share of bugs and issues, but then you are also getting the bleeding edge version of Chrome that is available. Follow the steps below to know how you can enable Picture-in-Picture in Chrome on your Mac.
How to Enable Picture-in-Picture in Google Chrome
Step 1: Download and install the latest Chrome Canary build for Mac from here.
Step 2: With the browser downloaded and installed, you now need to enable some experimental flags to enable Picture-in-Picture.
Step 3: Paste the followings flags one by one in the URL bar and enable them. Flag 1:
chrome://flags/#enable-experimental-web-platform-features
This flag will enable the experimental Web Platform features that are still in development. Flag 2:
chrome://flags/#enable-surfaces-for-videos
Allows compositing onto a Surface instead of a VideoLayer. This is required for PiP feature to work. Flag 3:
chrome://flags/#enable-picture-in-picture
This flag will finally enable the Picture-in-Picture feature for the browser. With all the flags enabled, restart Chrome for the changes to take effect.
Step 4: You are not done yet. Now, head over to GitHub and download this Chrome extension. Now, head over to the Chrome extension page by using the below flag and enable the Developer mode option.
chrome://extensions
Step 5: You will now be able to install the extension you downloaded in the previous step by selecting the Load Unpacked option.
Now, point the Finder window to the folder where you extracted the contents from the PiP extension zip file. Now, you can playback any video in Picture-in-Picture mode by clicking the PiP extension button right beside the URL bar anytime a video is playing in a tab. The player will then automatically resize to the bottom corner of the display.
In some popular video sites like YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, the PiP player should automatically work, though it did not work for me on YouTube. Since the Picture-in-Picture feature is under development, it has its own share of issues right now. The biggest deal breaker right now perhaps is that only the first video is played back in Picture-in-Picture mode.
All videos after that are played back in the main browser window. You also cannot navigate away from the main video page as the video will otherwise stop playing.
The PiP player in itself is also limited as it cannot be resized or moved around which is a major bummer. However, as the feature is still under development, Google will address these issues and fix them before releasing Picture-in-Picture to the stable build of Chrome.
Google is also making a PiP API available to developers so that they can prepare the video player and content on their site to take advantage of this feature when it formally launches down the line. Right now, Google is still testing Picture-in-Picture as an experiment so this feature is going to be a part of Chrome Canary until August 30, 2018. After this, the feature will graduate to become a part of Chrome 68 Beta before possibly making its way to the stable release of Chrome 69.
