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Chrome Tests Picture-in-Picture API To Show Floating Video Popups Outside the Browser (bleepingcomputer.com)
Browser makers are working on a new W3C API that will standardize Picture-in-Picture (PiP) mode and allow websites to show a floating video popup outside the browser window itself. From a report: In the past, picture-in-picture has only been supported inside a web page's canvas as a floating window that only appeared inside the current website, as the user scrolled up and down the page. Some platforms added support for a picture-in-picture mode, but those were OS-specific APIs that worked with all sorts of video apps, not just browsers. Now, the Web Platform Incubator Community Group (WICG) at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), has released details about a browser-specific API for standardizing picture-in-picture interactions that allow websites to open an external "floating video" popup outside the browser window itself. [...] Chrome and Safari have already shipped out the new Picture-in-Picture API.
Exactly. Now all the sites that obnoxiously start playing videos when you load the pages (and nothing stops all of them) are going to pop open windows to do the same. Pop-up to the side, pop-up over top, pop-under...
And is there a limit to how many windows a site can open this way?
What could possibly go wrong?
This breaks the window to content relation, unless it goes away when unfocused. And if it goes away, why bother having it outside the content window? If the user can't figure out which web page/app generated the pop-out, this feature is only going to cause frustration.
To be fair "This specification was published by the Web Platform Incubator Community Group. It is not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track."
If this ever changes and W3C is willing to pursuit such a blatantly anti-user misfeatures the organization will have lost all remaining respect and legitimacy with me for what little that's worth.