How to Use Picture in Picture on Mac (Safari + Beyond)

Picture in Picture pops a video out of its tab into a borderless floating player that stays on top of every window — even full-screen apps. It's built into Safari on Ventura, Sonoma, and Sequoia, and once you know the double right-click trick, it works on YouTube and nearly every other player.

Start Picture in Picture in Safari

1. Play the video in Safari.
2. Right-click the video. On YouTube and many other sites, the first right-click opens the site's own custom menu. Right-click a second time (without moving the pointer) and Safari's real context menu appears on top of it.
3. Choose Enter Picture in Picture.

The video detaches into a floating window and the tab shows a placeholder. Safari floats one video at a time — starting PiP on a second video sends the first back to its tab. There's a second route that skips hunting for the video entirely: when a tab is playing audio, right-click the speaker icon in the tab (or the audio button in Safari's address bar) and choose Enter Picture in Picture. That works even when the video is scrolled out of view.

Move, resize, and pin the player

• Drag it anywhere — the player snaps to the nearest corner of the screen when you let go. Holding Cmd while dragging lets it sit anywhere, un-snapped.
• Resize freely by dragging any edge or corner — from a thumbnail up to roughly a quarter of the display.
• It stays on top of everything: other apps, other windows, and it follows you across Spaces and full-screen apps. That's the whole point — it's the closest thing macOS has to an always-on-top window.
• The overlay controls give you play/pause and a button to return the video to its tab; the × closes it (the tab keeps playing audio unless you pause).

Beyond Safari: Chrome, Firefox, and the rest

Picture in Picture is a browser feature, so each browser has its own trigger:

• Chrome: the same double right-click on the video, then Picture in picture — or click the music-note media button in the toolbar and use its PiP control.
• Firefox: hover any video and click the small PiP overlay button that appears on its edge.

Native Mac video apps generally don't need PiP — many have their own floating or mini-player modes — but for anything playing in a browser, PiP is the tool.

A few behaviors worth knowing once the player is floating: audio keeps routing through the original tab, so the tab's mute button and your normal volume keys both work; closing the source tab ends the PiP session; and pausing from the floating window pauses the page's player too — they're the same playback, just displayed elsewhere. The floating window also survives Space switches and full-screen apps, which makes it ideal for keeping a talk or match visible during a presentation or while writing in a full-screen editor.

When the menu doesn't show PiP

A few players draw the video inside a custom canvas or block context menus. Two fixes: use the tab audio icon route described above, which bypasses the page entirely, or start playback and check the macOS Now Playing widget — some sites expose a PiP control there. DRM-heavy streaming sites occasionally disable PiP outright; if neither route offers it, that site has opted out.

Pair it with a tidy layout

PiP floats over everything, so park it in the corner you use least — then tile your working windows around it. See the full guide to keeping windows on top for the non-video options.