YouTube Miniplayer rolling out on the web for picture-in-picture

[steven36]

Back in March, YouTube began testing picture-in-picture on the web for simultaneous watching and browsing. While the previous A/B test was limited in scope, a new YouTube Miniplayer appears to be widely rolling out this evening.

 

With the previous design in March, users could only enable PiP when navigating away from the current playing video. There is now a Miniplayer icon in the bottom-right of the video window.

 

Clicking will shrink the video to the bottom-right corner, with the current play/pause state intact. Meanwhile, the window notes the current video title and channel it’s from, while playlists are also marked.

 

Hovering over the minimized window will reveal a play button and the ability to jump backwards and forwards in a playlist, while the seek bar is at the bottom of the video. When watching a playlist, a chevron in the bottom-right corner allows users to see a list of what’s upcoming with the ability to jump around. Additional controls for repeat and shuffle are useful when listening to music.

 

A close button is available in the upper-right corner. Clicking anywhere on the window will open the full video page, while a right-click brings up a menu of options.

 

Enabling the YouTube Miniplayer will result in the site navigating users to their last visited page, be it search results or a channel. If users visited a video directly, enabling PiP will take them to the YouTube homepage. The clear intent of this feature is to let you browse while watching the video on a sizable window.

 

As of today, this YouTube Miniplayer option appears to be available for quite a few users. We’ve tested it on Chrome for Mac, as well as desktop Safari and Chrome OS. The option appears when logged in and in Incognito mode.

 

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