Floating Player for Chrome

If you spend most of your day behind a desk, your computer might be the only entertainment or information source available. Watching videos or listening to music are, for most of us, ways to cope. However, depending on the workload or space required for it, watching videos within a Chrome tab can be annoying at times, especially if you want to minimize it without losing parts of the clips. Floating Player for Chrome may be of help here, as it employs the picture-in-picture (PiP) feature in order to provide you a smaller video screen.

After you install the add-on, a simple, red play button will be displayed on the extension bar. To start using the player, you have to be on the page that hosts the video you intend to watch. Clicking the player's icon will immediately extract the video source from that page, allowing you to drag it everywhere on the screen.

The newly created window won't display any borders, and it can be quickly closed or reattached to its source. Keep in mind that only the video feed will be free to control, as the audio will still be generated by the initial page. In short, don't close the initial page, or the player will be closed with it — minimize it or leave it in the background.

The extension's context menu reveals the Options menu. From there, you can check out and apply a good number of features that are mostly related to whatever function is canceled by going PiP. For instance, the captions and comments sections for YouTube are discarded when the player is active, however, you can scroll through the settings and bring them back. Also, any extra function you activate will take up some of the space, so make sure they are worth it.

To summarize, Floating Player is a quick and simple way of deploying the picture-in-picture mode for any video you watch, no matter the host. We recommend it to users who struggle with screen space, but still want to have that part of the screen where they can escape from time to time. Regarding the operation process, a single click and a quick resize will get you what you need, but in case you want some more stuff on display, don't hesitate to check the options.