Slashdot Mirror
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.
You thought pop-over ads and auto-play videos were bad before?!?? Hopefully this can be disabled...
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
This seems like a return to the bad old days of pop-up ad windows over pop-up windows, but now with extra bandwidth-sluuuurping video. Disable. For good. With prejudice.
No user has ever asked for this. Advertisers, yes, but actual users, no. This move should prove once and for all who Google exists for.
Almost every news site now is already being offensive with their autoplay video that follows you and also jumps around on the page as you scroll down. And the video players don't all work the same -- some of them you click in the middle to pause, some you have to locate the pause button (wherever it may be), some of them can be closed entirely, others cannot. But universally I stop all of these videos. Neither the video nor the audio are wanted.
Putting these autoplay video sinto a popout window doesn't solve the problem, it only moves the problem into a popout window. W. T. F.
Stop using a web browser developed by an advertising company. This is all of our fault, for making Chrome popular.
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.
Adverts, yes. Bleah.
What about security implications? Perhaps the "video" simulates other applications, other windows?
If you are browsing on a phone and lock your phone, the standard dictates a drone deliver a second phone to you with the video still playing where you left off.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Seems like a <blink>GREAT</blink> idea!
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.