I find it quite handy when browsing YouTube. I even thought it was a YouTube feature before I realised it didn't work in chrome.

PiP has greatly improved my Zwift+Netflix experience. Zwift is a "fitness game" that is best enjoyed with a TV stream alongside (sorry Zwift, you're not that engaging), that like most games doesn't really support arbitrary aspect ratio and that is best enjoyed on the big TV screen. It can easily tolerated some of its UI getting obscured but you do want to keep it focused for possible key events. Before PiP arranging those windows was a permanent struggle with focus and tricks to hide as much of the browser UI as possible (not much). It's still not perfect because PiP is reset between episodes, but I don't expect this to remain a problem forever.

I use PIP a lot in Chrome while browsing Reddit. If I see a video link, I can play the video while continuing to scroll through Reddit comments.

(YouTube PIP is kind of difficult to discover; you have to right-click, move the mouse off the menu, and right-click again to get the native right-click menu, which is where the PIP button is.)

Why not just open it in another tab?

You mean open in another window, arrange and resize that window to not get in the way while making the video visible, hoping that the website layout doesn't make that close to impossible, and still not easily being able to have it stay on top of the window you interact with... instead of a single click that does the right thing?

Is there a way to disable PIP support? The blue floating icon is quite distracting for me, I wouldn’t mind PIP but I can’t stand the floating icon.

A comment on reddit said they use it all the time when following coding tutorials. Seems like a handy use case.

That brings up a second question: who watches coding tutorials? I'd imagine it's probably people with less than a few weeks of coding experience, because it's horribly inefficient compared to text tutorials.

I find them valuable if you don't need to write code to experiment with but can just watch the video at the regular speed and get the concepts that you can then use in your project. Also allows for watching while you do other stuff on the side.

SymfonyCasts is an example where I like the videos. They aren't the typical YouTube style of "let me talk about random things for 5 minutes so I get this video over the 10 minute mark", they get pretty much straight to the point. They have a text version below, which also makes search easy, And you can click on any sentence in the text version to jump to the right position in the video. I found them very helpful when I started with Symfony, but haven't really watched any once I had a solid enough understanding to get work done and incrementally learn more things as I need them.

I've occasionally found them helpful for less mainstream stuff where there's a lack of quality resources.

The 'failure mode' for a lazy text tutorial is that important details are left out. The 'failure mode' for a lazy video tutorial is that they didn't edit anything out.

One of my few very good teachers in school highlighted that people learn differently - some people by reading, others doing and others again watching. I'm most definitely somewhere between the last two. I find that for me watching high quality tutorials (pluralsight, CBTNuggets, etc) at 1.5-2x speed is a very good way to get introduced into a language particularly when I seed a solid foundational understanding rather than knowing exactly how to add an additional command into npm run, etc.

> I'd imagine it's probably people with less than a few weeks of coding experience

In the end everybody eventually needs to learn from written content; not only for the viewers efficiency, but also because it's more efficient for content creators to produce written content over video content.

You can even guess your 'reckon' from looking at the kind of video content that is out there - again, this seems mostly to be a consequence of creator efficiency.

With that said, who cares?

Hell, I sometimes hit up streams - for instance, Antirez has been streaming himself building out parts of Redis 6, because it may introduce me to new techniques or minutae I didn't know. It's way, way, way more chill than reading source code, and it's a lot better than the blog post on it he probably won't write.

Anything with an unfamiliar IDE can be very confusing without a video tutorial.

Which approach has better efficiency is dependent on person.

I use picture in picture all the time! I have 3 monitors, but still not enough spave to take a full one up with a browser. So if I've got a YouTube video playing I'll pop it out and stick it in a corner of one.

I use PiP for various videos, whilst I’m working and not splitting the screen.

Yea, I don't get it either. On the other hand, I almost never use a window that isn't maximized.

It's useful sometimes. Other times, I'd love to have a feature that would maximize to the browser content area, keeping the tab navigation (including sidebar).

I do love that feature.

I wish it was a little bit easier to maximize on other monitors

instead of having to try to resize it perfectly

it allows me to size a video frame arbitrarily from YouTube across multiple monitors, rather than relying on YouTubes stepped resize and wasting screen real estate on YT comments.

it allows me to size video frames arbitrarily across streaming sites like CyTube that don't support frame-out natively.

As someone who had to use mosaic and gopher and all that shit, i'd really rather not revisit it. It's nice in the way that it's sort of quaint to boot up an old workstation that has nothing but QBASIC, but it's not actually pleasant or useful.

I use it a lot because I have only one monitor.

Couldn't you just open it in a new window and resize/tile your existing windows?

Websites often change their layout depending on the window size. If you simply make the window smaller, the website may switch into a different layout that makes the video even smaller. It doesn't solve the problem of showing just the video with nothing else.

You are mad I use this feature all the time.

browsers let users access content from the internet and some of that content is video. for the life of me i can't see why it took so long ;)

Its helpful for increasing your ADHD.