You can now go PiP from GMC. That is, you can now enable Picture in Picture mode for videos from the Global Media Control screen on your Chrome’s toolbar.

Allow me to explain.

You are familiar with Picture in Picture. I have been using this feature on Chrome using an extension that adds Picture in Picture icon to the taskbar.

Global Media Controls is another feature that Chrome recently added. It is a small icon and a popup on your Chrome toolbar to control media playback.

How is this helpful?

Imagine that you have 10 Chrome tabs open. One of them is Spotify and it is playing music. To pause or change tracks, you will have to leave the current tab and go to the Spotify tab each time.

With Global Media Controls, you can control media playback right from the Chrome toolbar, without leaving your current tab.

GMC + PiP

I wrote about upcoming changes to the Global Media Controls the other day. Today, I found another one in the Canary version of Chrome. You can now send a video into Picture in Picture from the Global Media Control popup.

No more extensions.

A new experimental flag adds this PiP icon to the Global Media Control overlay:

Global Media Controls Picture-in-Picture: Enables Picture-in-Picture controls in the Global Media Controls UI. Requires #global-media-controls to also be enabled. – Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS

Here is how the new UI looks like:

You can turn off Picture in Picture from the same place. The Picture in Picture icon is a toggle to turn it on or off.

Global Media Controls is already a useful feature. With the addition of new features like this, it will soon become one of the most favorite Chrome features for me.

What about you? How often do you use GMC? Let me know in the comments section.