Mozilla Firefox includes a highly useful “Picture-in-Picture” (PiP) feature that allows you to pop a playing web video (like a YouTube or Netflix clip) out of its original webpage and float it in a resizable window on top of your desktop. Whenever you hover your mouse over a playing video, a small blue “Watch in Picture-in-Picture” overlay button appears on the edge of the video frame. While this is great for multitasking, the overlay button can be visually annoying if you never use the feature and just want an unobstructed view of the video player. You can completely disable this overlay.
How to Turn Off the Picture-in-Picture Overlay
You can disable the feature directly in the general browsing settings.
- Open the Mozilla Firefox browser.
- Click the Application Menu button (the three horizontal lines) in the top-right corner.
- Select Settings from the drop-down menu.
- Ensure you are on the General tab in the left-hand sidebar.
- Scroll down the page until you find the Browsing section.
- Look for the checkbox labelled Enable picture-in-picture video controls.
- Click this checkbox to uncheck it.
The change takes effect immediately. The next time you watch a video on YouTube or any other streaming site, the floating blue PiP toggle will no longer appear when you move your mouse over the player. You can still watch the video in full-screen or theater mode normally, but you will not be able to pop the video out into a floating desktop window.