You can watch YouTube videos in background tabs in Chrome soon

Tired of having to switch between tabs when you have a YouTube video playing in one while working on something else (or reading an article, or browsing your emails, or chatting on Messenger, etc.) in another? An upcoming Chrome update may have the solution for you.

Leopeva64 tweeted (spotted by XDA Developers) that Chrome is testing a new automatic picture-in-picture mode with YouTube videos. This means that you will soon be able to watch YouTube videos from a background tab while actively doing something else in another tab.

You’ve probably seen YouTube’s mini player that appears in the corner when you’re playing a video but navigating around YouTube itself. In Leopeva64’s clip, you can see something very similar happen when he switches from YouTube to another tab while a video is playing.

The first time it happens, YouTube asks if you want to allow picture-in-picture mode, with options to allow once, allow every time, or don’t allow. Given that this is a Chrome feature, we can expect other sites to start supporting it down the road. As of now, the list of sites that support it remains small and almost non-existent.

The new picture-in-picture feature is currently available for beta testing in the Canary version of Chrome. It’s unclear how long it will stay there before being launched to the public in Chrome’s stable version.