PiP is such a great feature. I have no idea how easy/hard it was to implement but it feels nice to use. It does exactly what you'd expect it to do and nothing more.
I use it while watching overwatch league games in the browser because it allows me to resize the popped-out video arbitrarily, instead of the site's embedded youtube player options of either tiny-window-in-browser or full-screen sizes (there is no theater mode in the embedded player for some reason).
If you're interested in seeing it getting implemented, you can check out Mike Conley's YouTube channel. He regularly streams Firefox development and he's the main force behind PiP in Firefox. I believe the first episode where it's mentioned is #165 [0] but it spans over many of them.
It is a little clunky and could use a good deal of polish. For example, you can only PiP one video, and controls remain in the tab with the video frame. PiP only gives you play/pause, no scrubbing or anything from the embedded player. The always on top is a feature for some, but can be a hindrance, too. That behavior should be a toggle for the user so they can use their tools how they like.
These are a few of the reasons I've continued to use the "Open With" extension with mpv. ([right-click]->Open With->mpv) This provides full playback control, lets me toggle stay-on-top, etc. Firefox's PiP is a nice thought but just isn't right for me as currently implemented.
if it's not always on top, why break it out of the browser window at all? maybe i just haven't used it enough for your request to become apparent to me, but it seems counter intuitive on first thought.
I really like Firefox PIP, but it's not perfect yet. I have missed the "timeline" so it would be easy to jump back if I wanted to re-watch the last bit. But I have noticed now that if the PIP window is active the arrow keys works for that which is great and it's also possible change volume with up/down arrow. So what a most miss now is that the PIP window remember its size and position from last time. Right now (on youtube) different resolutions gives different window sizes.
I wish I could get subtitle support on Netflix. Their app doesn't allow you to resize when its as always on top. PiP allows me to position it where and how I want, but lacks subtitles :(
A long time ago, I wrote the PIP feature for browsers on the very first version of Android based Smart TVs (Phillips TVs). It used Mozilla's Gecko NPAPI plugin ( their version of WebKit) and built on top of Opera, the only one at the time that would support funnelling broadcast TV data at the time.
It was pretty challenging, but still way more easier than trying to build with Safari, chrome. I always wondered why this feature never really became mainstream until now.
Is anyone else annoyed that Mozilla chose to spam them with an ad for this new feature via the email address they received when creating the Firefox sync account? Is this really such an important thing that warrants sending an unsolicited message to every Firefox user's inbox?
Yes, the footer says "You're receiving this email because .. is subscribed to Firefox Account Tips." and indeed I can now see that setting in my Firefox account. I'm sure that checkbox popped up sometime after I created the account and was conveniently set to "true" by default.
There's also conveniently a new category whenever they want to make sure everyone has to be bothered by the newest junk. Or a very slight rename of an existing one, but hey, that means they get to ignore the previous setting.
To me, such sleazy tactics are simply a deep admission of failure.
> I'm sure that checkbox popped up sometime after I created the account and was conveniently set to "true" by default.
Someone got paid to sell you out and cashed their check on your privacy. I wonder if they have a gdpr contact and what it would look like if you forwarded this and told them you did not consent to it.
GDPR doesn't handle sending marketing mails and even in the EU it is entirely fine to send those by default as long as they directly related to your product ("assumed consent of consumer" is the key word here). Firefox does offer a complete opt-out last I checked that works entirely fine (never received a mail after unsubscribing to marketing mails)
Email is a dumpster fire. I run my own mail server and I don’t have any spam filtering. My inbox is full of spam and “helpful tips” and other garbage. Because of this I rarely read my email.
I would set up spam filtering but I don’t trust SpamAssasin to actually be useful rather than just another headache, because last time I was on a system where it was in use it routinely marked non-spam things as spam while simultaneously letting through a whole lot of spam. Admittedly this was years ago.
I did find Paul Graham’s essay on spam filtering inspiring and thought about doing something like that for myself. But although I have a huge corpus of spam, I don’t have a whole lot of non-spam because I don’t receive a lot of non-spam.
Spam is also annoying and uninspiring to do anything about because it is just yet another of the billions of problems that we have that were caused by other people being inconsiderate dicks :(
It currently feels like almost all problems that I could work on should not have existed in the first place and are only there because of us all being the way that we are.
I love PiP and it's def great in WFH situation where I can just have YouTube videos playing on the side.
If anyone from Mozilla is reading this, one thing I wish Firefox did was to allow us to make it sticky to the corner like Safari does on MacOS.
I think just throwing the PiP window to a corner and expecting it to be there is subtle difference but makes the overall experience much simpler. I don't having to decide where exactly to position the video and keep moving it little by little. Also, if I push the Safari PiP video against the edge of the screen, it simply collapses. That's helpful when the video is blocking something I care about and I need to quickly hide it. Again, simpler experience than allowing free form movement for my workflow.
I'm really surprised to see how many people appreciate this feature. I've tried to use it many times but I've found that when I'm watching a video I either want to give it my full(screen) attention (movie, entertainment) or have it in the background entirely (music, news, podcast.)
I've personally not found a use for it and end up closing it after about 5-10 minutes.
Obviously there's a wide spectrum of possible uses and different people have different "focus" tastes. I've found Firefox's PIP particularly useful in watching videos while grinding in certain types of MMOs. So long as the MMOs support "Borderless Window Fullscreen" rather than "pure" fullscreen, Firefox's PIP shows up right on top. I just recently upgraded to an ultra-widescreen so I've got plenty of horizontal space to play with. In a previous dual monitor setup I might have just had the game on one screen and the show on the other. This PIP gives me a bit more flexibility than that, especially I discover which games sing in the "2k" fullscreen. Some of these MMOs I didn't realize quite how cramped they felt in 1080p until I got to extend them to ultra-wide.
I like more than thought I would. I can keep going through tabs without losing the video.
The problem for me is it doesn’t have controls past pause and play. If I want to back the video up or skip it forward I need to go figure out which tab it’s coming from, and I can’t remember if I have to unpop to get controls. Windows 10, ymmv.
i use it when i'm watching a youtube or other video that has interesting parts, but also lots of fluff. PiP lets me do other things and mostly ignore the fluff
The linked article was posted on January 6th, 2020. For some reason many people received an email about it today. Must have just been a soft rollout and now they are starting to actually publicize the feature?
Same here. FF on Mac. I’ve been using it since lockdown began in the UK in March. It’s been really handy to keep BBC News in the corner of the screen when the Government was doing daily briefings.
PiP is a cool feature but I've recently found another way to "stream" video from the web which is now pretty much my default: For a lot of sites you can either curl or youtube-dl the video to a file and thanks to the way encodings and container formats work you can just play the file back using your favorite media player while the download is still in progress. You can't seek past the download head unfortunately but the playback you get is much more pleasant (and for some reason also faster?) than say, on YouTube.
There are a couple of sites that auto-started video and when you scrolled down, automatically did picture-in-picture. In fact I think Facebook even experimented with it for a while. The problem with those implementations was that the user had no control over which videos, nor the ability to prevent them from displaying. It took a heavy amount of NoScript isolation to prevent it from happening. I always thought it would be useful if someone would write something that put the user back in control.
Readit News
I use it while watching overwatch league games in the browser because it allows me to resize the popped-out video arbitrarily, instead of the site's embedded youtube player options of either tiny-window-in-browser or full-screen sizes (there is no theater mode in the embedded player for some reason).
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_5zwg9Ucoc
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/01/how-we-built-picture-in-pi...
Not as accessible as Firefox for sure.
Yes, the footer says "You're receiving this email because .. is subscribed to Firefox Account Tips." and indeed I can now see that setting in my Firefox account. I'm sure that checkbox popped up sometime after I created the account and was conveniently set to "true" by default.
To me, such sleazy tactics are simply a deep admission of failure.
I marked the email as spam because that’s what it is.
Someone got paid to sell you out and cashed their check on your privacy. I wonder if they have a gdpr contact and what it would look like if you forwarded this and told them you did not consent to it.
I would set up spam filtering but I don’t trust SpamAssasin to actually be useful rather than just another headache, because last time I was on a system where it was in use it routinely marked non-spam things as spam while simultaneously letting through a whole lot of spam. Admittedly this was years ago.
I did find Paul Graham’s essay on spam filtering inspiring and thought about doing something like that for myself. But although I have a huge corpus of spam, I don’t have a whole lot of non-spam because I don’t receive a lot of non-spam.
Spam is also annoying and uninspiring to do anything about because it is just yet another of the billions of problems that we have that were caused by other people being inconsiderate dicks :(
It currently feels like almost all problems that I could work on should not have existed in the first place and are only there because of us all being the way that we are.
If anyone from Mozilla is reading this, one thing I wish Firefox did was to allow us to make it sticky to the corner like Safari does on MacOS.
I think just throwing the PiP window to a corner and expecting it to be there is subtle difference but makes the overall experience much simpler. I don't having to decide where exactly to position the video and keep moving it little by little. Also, if I push the Safari PiP video against the edge of the screen, it simply collapses. That's helpful when the video is blocking something I care about and I need to quickly hide it. Again, simpler experience than allowing free form movement for my workflow.
The problem for me is it doesn’t have controls past pause and play. If I want to back the video up or skip it forward I need to go figure out which tab it’s coming from, and I can’t remember if I have to unpop to get controls. Windows 10, ymmv.