After a long wait, Mozilla finally provides subtitles and captions support for YouTube in picture-in-picture mode in a recent update to Firefox. Mozilla is currently working on supporting Prime and Netflix. Chrome’s picture-in-picture mode depends on the website, while picture-in-picture in Firefox browser is a browser UI feature that is compatible with most web videos.
The picture-in-picture feature was introduced in Firefox 71 and has gained a good reputation among the user base. It lets you pop or float videos playing on websites and pin them anywhere on the screen. Show pause and mute button control when the player window hovers. This feature works with most videos you watch online. However, some videos don’t show a picture-in-picture button when you hover over them.
However, it should be noted that the implementation of subtitles in YouTube, Netflix, and Prime videos is different. This made it difficult for Mozilla to find a common solution to the problem. Speaking of which, the company has started developing site-specific adapters (behaviors) for picture-in-picture. This allows picture-in-picture detection, cloning, and display of subtitles and descriptions for specific video sites in the player window.
Enable subtitle and caption support for YouTube videos in Firefox picture-in-picture mode
- Launch Firefox browser
- Go to about:config
- Click “Accept the risk and continue” to agree to the warning
- In the search box, copy and paste “media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.display-text-tracks.enabled” and change the default value to true.
- Now open Youtube, play any video, click the subtitle/title button in the player window, hover over the video, and click the picture-in-picture toggle button.
- The Firefox picture-in-picture window will display subtitles or descriptions of the video being played.