About Picture-in-Picture in Firefox
Revision Information
- Revision id: 191777
- Created:
- Creator: Marcelo Ghelman
- Comment: Full screen, Placeholder, and more
- Reviewed: No
- Ready for localization: No
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Available in Firefox version 71 for Windows and 72 for MacOS and Linux, the Picture-in-Picture feature allows you to pop videos out of their webpage into a floating, always on top, window so you can watch while continuing to work in other tabs. You can move the Picture-in-Picture window around the screen and resize it to your liking.
Table of Contents
Using picture-in-picture
Toggle
The Picture-in-Picture toggle appears when you hover over videos with the mouse cursor. It is a small blue rectangle that slides out when you hover over it. Clicking on the blue rectangle will open the underlying video in the Picture-in-Picture player window.
This feature is designed to work on most web videos. Though some videos will not display the blue toggle hovering over it. We only show it for videos that include an audio track, and that are also of sufficient size and play length.
The blue toggle doesn't appear when a video is on full screen.
Context Menu
Another way to access Picture-in-Picture is via the context menu. If right-click on a web video, you’ll sometimes see the media context menu that looks like this:
There’s a Picture-in-Picture menu item in that context menu that you can use to toggle the feature.
Many sites, however, make it difficult to access the context menu for web videos. YouTube, for example, overrides the default context menu with their own.
You can get to the default native context menu by either holding Shift while right-clicking, or double right-clicking.
When a video is on full screen, the Picture-in-Picture menu item is not included in the context menu. You have to exit full screen to switch to Picture-in-Picture through the blue toggle or the context menu. (Note: The keyboard shortcut works on full screen.)
Keyboard shortcut
To access via the keyboard press the combination CtrlCmd + Shift + ] or CtrlCmd + Shift + }. Firefox will attempt to launch the most relevant video on the page into a Picture-in-Picture window.
Player window
The Picture-in-Picture window also gives you the ability to quickly play or pause the video — hovering the video with your mouse will expose that control, as well as a control for closing the window, and closing the window while returning you to the tab that the video came from.
Video placeholder on the page
When a video is in Picture-in-Picture view, the video placeholder on the page shows the message This video is playing in Picture-in-Picture mode. You can still use the video controls on the placeholder, such as play/pause, volume, and full screen.
Disabling the Picture-in-Picture toggle
If you prefer to disable the blue toggle, so it does not appear over top of videos there are two easy ways to do that. Either on a site that has a supported video or in the Settings menu.
Using the Picture-in-Picture toggle to disable it
- Find a video where you can see the blue Picture-in-Picture toggle.
- Right click on the blue toggle.
- Click .
Enabling / disabling the Picture-in-Picture toggle in Settings
If you don’t want to see the controls while hovering, you can hide that option in Firefox. (Note: You can still turn on picture-in-picture view by right-clicking a video.) Or you can use this to re-enable the control when you want to use it again.
- In the Menu bar at the top of the screen, click and then select or , depending on your macOS version.Click the menu button and select .
- In the panel, scroll down to the Browsing section.
- Clear the check mark for Enable picture-in-picture video controls.
If you later want to re-enable the controls, simply add back the check mark.