Picture-in-picture mode lets you view videos in a separate floating window by detaching them from their respective websites for a more immersive experience. Your video will continue playing in the floating window even when you switch to a different tab or application so you can multitask easily.

While you can enable PiP mode manually on websites that support it, Firefox also supports automatic PiP, which means you don't have to manually toggle it on every time. Here is how you can enable automatic Picture-in-Picture in the browser.

  1. Open Firefox and click on the hamburger menu which appears as three horizontal lines on the top right.
  1. Click on 'Settings' in the dropdown menu.
  1. When the Settings page opens, click on 'Firefox Labs' on the left.
  1. Click on the 'Picture-in-Picture: auto-open on tab switch' checkbox to enable it.
  1. Now, you can test whether automatic Picture-in-Picture is working in Firefox or not. Go to a video hosting platform such as YouTube and start playing a video.
  1. Then switch to a new tab and your video should appear in a floating window on the new tab. It should also remain visible when you switch to a different application or minimize the browser.
  1. The floating window will have minimal controls you can use to control the video. You can play, pause, move the video forward and backward, mute it, change the size of the video player, and go full-screen. If you go back to the YouTube page or whatever website you were playing the video on, the PiP window will close and the video will start playing from the main window.
  1. You can reposition the video by clicking and dragging the picture-in-picture window to any other position on your screen.
  1. Similarly, you can switch back to the tab from where you started playing the video by clicking on the 'Back to tab' button on the top left of the picture-in-picture window.
  1. You can also resize the picture-in-picture window by dragging any of its edges. Keep in mind that it will only increase or decrease in size in a fixed ratio. You cannot freely change its aspect ratio.
  1. To close the picture-in-picture window, hover your cursor over it and click on the 'x' button when it appears in the top right corner.
Note: The picture-in-picture button will not appear if you are playing videos in full-screen mode. You will first need to exit the full-screen mode before you can access the picture-in-picture button.

Using Picture-in-Picture manually

If you do not want videos to start playing in PiP mode automatically every time, you can toggle the feature on and off manually in a few ways.

Method 1: Using the video toggle on your screen

  1. Open a video on any website in Firefox and hover your cursor over it. You will see the picture-in-picture button appear over the video. Click on the 'Pop out this video' button.
  1. Your video will start playing in Picture-in-Picture mode on the bottom right of your screen with the same controls as above.

Method 2: Using the right-click menu

  1. Right-click on a video playing in your Firefox browser and then click on the 'Watch in picture-in-picture' option. You can also play, pause, mute, change the speed of the video, loop the video, and go full screen using this menu.
Note: You may find it difficult to access the Firefox right-click menu on certain websites. Some websites, like YouTube, display their own context menu when you right-click on a video. In such situations, double right-clicking or holding the Shift key while right-clicking will help you access the Firefox context menu instead of the website's custom menu.

Method 3: Using keyboard shortcuts

You can also use various shortcuts to view videos in picture-in-picture mode in Firefox. Use Ctrl + Shift + ] to start a video in picture-in-picture mode or close it if it is already running in that mode. Once in that mode, you can use several other shortcuts to control video playback.

Things to know

  • To use the new automatic Picture-in-Picture mode, you should be running Firefox version 130 or later. On older versions, you only have manual controls.
  • If you do not see PiP video controls in the floating video player after enabling automatic Picture-in-Picture in Firefox, go to the 'General' section in Firefox settings and click on 'Enable Picture-in-Picture video controls' there.
  • Captions and subtitles will also appear in picture-in-picture mode on supported videos. However, you will have to turn them on while the video is in regular mode before switching to picture-in-picture mode. Subtitles for several websites like Netflix and YouTube are enabled by default.
  • As long as your video is playing in Picture-in-Picture mode, the video player will always remain on your screen regardless of what you are doing. You can go back to the main video player or close the PiP window but cannot minimize it.
  • Firefox also allows you to play multiple videos in Picture-in-Picture mode.