If you swear by the original version when watching a movie or TV show, good news: Firefox has even better support for subtitles and captions appearing in videos. In fact, it was obviously already the case, but the browser excluded a particular case: the “picture in picture” (PiP), which in fact allows to keep a video always in the foreground on the screen.
A mode to have the videos always on the screen
The picture in picture is a feature available since 2019 in Firefox. It allows you to launch a video (and adjust its dimensions at will) in a corner of the screen, in order to have it in the field of vision, while doing something else at the same time – for example, you can do your daunting daily quests in your favorite MMORPG, while watching a video to pass the time more easily.
Unfortunately, support for subtitles and captions was not provided. Boring when you don’t understand the language of the video. However, Firefox eventually integrated — finally! — support for subtitling. However, it took until 2022 and 21 versions of Firefox for the picture in picture to no longer suffer from this significant handicap.
With Firefox 100, released on May 3, windowed captioning of videos on Firefox made its debut with YouTube, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. The launch of Firefox 102 now extends functionality to six other platforms: Disney+ Hotstar, HBO Max, Dailymotion, Tubi, Funimation and SonyLIV.
Subtitles in picture in picture mode may not be of major interest when understanding the language of the video — such as English. But unless you are a polyglot, they will come in handy when you hear another language. And they can also have another benefit for deaf people, giving them visual support, even in windowed mode.
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