Windowed for Chrome

Playing a video on your browser is often a small commitment of sorts: unless you don't want to open another tab to have the clip in a sort of Picture-in-picture mode, you'll most likely want to play it in full-screen. As such, your display would be busy with the footage, leaving you no space to multitask.

Though some websites offer Picture-in-picture modes for their videos, it's not much of a common practice. To help with that, Windowed for Chrome allows users to play full-screen videos in several ways: whether it's windowed, in-window, or Picture-in-picture, it's all up to you.

Useful for those looking to multitask while watching their favorite videos, the extension is easy to get started with. Simply install it from the Chrome Web Store, and you'll be able to use it right away. When prompting to maximize a video, you'll be greeted with 3 options: windowed, in-window, or full-screen.

In essence, that's how the extension works: it affords users the choice between full-screen or windowed, and does so in a very intuitive manner. The extension also allows you to set a preference for windowed or full-screen, so you won't have to choose between them every time.

As for the supported websites, you'll likely not run into incompatibility issues. However, it's worth noting that flash videos, as well as clips with native HTML controls, will not be compatible.

Prompting to open your clips in the windowed mode will simply open a new window of your browser, with the video being maximized to the window's area. You can reposition and resize the area freely, so you'll be able to multitask while watching your videos without a problem. In-window works rather similarly, with the exception that the video is maximized to your current window.

Picture-in-picture, though not always supported, can work really well. Users can resize the video and move it around their browser window, much like any such mode would allow. However, if you want to increase or decrease the video volume, or skip through a section, you won't be able to do that in this mode.

Windowed for Chrome is an extension worth considering if you're looking to change full-screen videos into popups: to that end, it does a great job, simply and concisely.