There’s a lot to miss about Arc (RIP), but the feature I miss the most has got to be automatic picture-in-picture. You start a video and when you change tabs to jump to another task, the video anchored itself to the corner of your desktop. Go back to the video tab and it slurps up into the video player area. A perfect experience with no interruption.

I switched back to Edge (for work) and missed Auto-PiP a lot. I tried building a custom browser extension to restore the functionality myself but hit a platform limitation with the mix of WebExtensions, PageVisibility , and MediaSession APIs you need to get it to work seamlessly. You had to configure each site in a dropdown and run a script each MediaSession… it asked a lot of the user.

There’s been a handful of Chromium flags and experiments to add “Auto-PiP” over the years, but nothing did it as well as Arc did… until…

about://flags#browser-initiated-automatic-picture-in-picture

Chrome 142 introduced a new browser-initiated-automatic-picture-in-picture flag and it behaves the same as Arc. The browser does all the work popping the video in-and-out when expected. I couldn’t believe this near-exact replica was hiding in plain sight all this time! But I couldn’t use it because the flag didn’t exist in Edge 😭

I started up a couple internal threads about it last year but it went nowhere. When the topic came up again this year, I mentioned to Greg Whitworth, “Y’know there’s a flag in Chrome that does Auto-PiP great…” and that next week the flag showed up in Canary and I’m happy to say it’s available today in mainline Edge 156.

If you missed that feature in Arc and didn’t know it existed in Chrome or felt crushed by it not existing in Edge… then head over and turn on the flag today, I think you’ll be happy. The only thing it’s missing for me are the juicy physics-based animations that let you two-finger swipe and throw the picture-in-picture window around and pinch-zoom to resize. But it feels like the bones are there. And it feels like a good time to remind my fellow Edge users that Edge has a little feedback form inside the Three Dots menu > Help and Feedback > Send Feedback.