1550453 - Picture-In-Picture: toggle icon's display place should be customizable

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1680885

(Toolkit :: Picture-in-Picture, enhancement, P3)

Description

[jakub.g]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:66.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/66.0

Steps to reproduce:

0. Open Nightly
1. Load https://www.europe1.fr/direct-video and start the video
2. Hover over the video on the right edge in order to click Picture-In-Picture toggle

Actual results:

The PIP toggle is displayed behind the overlay "queue" functionality. It works even if it's behind the overlay, but the UI/UX is not great.

Expected results:

It should be possible to somewho customize the side of the video on which the PIP toggle appears.

Comment 1

[jakub.g]

To provide more context:

The video on the website is a Dailymotion embed. The queue on the right hand side is a built-in functionality of the embed (can be disabled, but it's on by default, hence it shows up on many websites). It is always displayed on the right hand side (also in RTL locales).

So given this, the expandable queue and the PIP icon will conflict in the UI on most of Dailymotion embeds.

It would be useful if there was a way to override the side on which the PIP icon appears, perhaps via an HTML attribute on the <video> tag.

Comment 2

[jakub.g]

Attachment: pip_firefox68nightly_dailymotion_with_queue.png

Comment 5

[Dan Harkless]

Yes, I have to wonder if the default location on the right for the Picture-in-Picture toggle was just chosen at random, or what. The vertically centered horizon line is the second most common place for video controls to appear, after the bottom edge (at least on English-language sites). In Firefox 74.0 they introduced special-casing to move the button to prevent it from interfering with Instagram's Next button, but clearly introducing special-casing for the myriad of sites that have UI at the right-center is not a tenable approach. In my experience, the top-center would be the location least likely for the button to interfere with site UI. I just filed Bug 1638494 regarding the need to change the poorly chosen current default.

Perhaps some countries have different conventions and frequently put UI along the top edge, but if so, that's merely a reason to make the default customizable both per locale, and, as this bug so rightly suggests, by the user. Even if there are no countries that tend to put UI along the top, there are probably a few oddball sites that do, so users of those sites should have the ability to move the default button location to suit them. (Having to set media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.video-toggle.enabled = false is not a good workaround due to the requirement to memorize the non-discoverable keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + ]/}.)

I don't think it's necessary to make this customizable per-site, but it would be neat if the config pref(s) took a string that could be in forms like (X_max / 2, 0), (X_max, Y_max), etc. An alternate approach would be to use verbal locations like "top-left, top-center, top-right, right-center, bottom-right...", but that'd of course be less flexible for oddball sites, would have translation issues, and might unnecessarily prompt the need for making the setting per-site customizable.

Comment 6

[Dan Harkless]

Oh, and the above assumes that any number higher than X_max - 1 or Y_max - 1 would be treated the same as X_max - 1 or Y_max - 1, to make it easier for users not intimately familiar with zero-based counting.

Comment 7

[Dan Harkless]

Sorry, wish Bugzilla had comment editing ability. Re-reading, I noticed that I should have said "I don't think it's necessary to make this user-customizable per-site." I do think it should be possible for site authors to customize the button location, but that's a separate issue from the needed user customizability.

Comment 9

[Hunter Jones]

Attachment: Bug 1550453: Allow users to move Picture-in-Picture toggle to left side of videore's toggle button customizable r?mtigley,mconley

Comment 10

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The bug assignee didn't login in Bugzilla in the last 7 months.
:mconley, could you have a look please?
For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 11

[Ania]

Let's treat this as a part of more holistic work on PiP settings in the future. The path that allows developer customizations is not something we'll be looking at though.

Currently, there's a workaround of using a keyboard shortcut Cmd + Option + Shift +] (on Mac) as a workaround, but it's not great (and temporarily broken in Firefox 98).

Comment 12

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Agreed. I'm going to mark the patch as abandoned and we can keep this in the backlog.

Comment 13

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Actually, on closer inspection, I think this has already been done in bug 1680885.