1608823 - Access to the desktop environment under the Picture-in-Picture video overlay

Status: UNCONFIRMED

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

Description

[Stéphane Roucheray]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0

Steps to reproduce:

1- Open a webpage with a video
2- Open the video in PiP

Actual results:

I need to move the video overlay to interact with the desktop environment that seats under it

Expected results:

PiP is really nice. Its main purpose seems to be able to keep working while the video is playing. The part of the desktop under the video overlay remain inaccessible until I move the video in another place, though. It is in contradiction with the usage.

I would like to be able to interact, at least with the mouse, with other desktop applications, under the video while it's playing.

Example usage : double click an icon, resizing a window, drag and drop something or selecting a text inside another page.

One way to achieve that could be to have a pin mode on the overlay.
By default the overlay would remain as today. A pin icon could be added to the overlay along with the close icon. When clicked, the pin mode would be activated. Then every other buttons on the overlay would disappear and the overlay would bypass any mouse event (similar to CSS pointer-events: none). The video could be semi-transparent when mouse over to let the user interact with the content underneath. The only remaining interactive part of the overlay would be the toggle pin icon that would allow to come back to non-pin mode.

What do you think ?

Comment 1

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

Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.