GoKawiilEdgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR Chrome for Android tablets could soon get a fix for an annoying bug with picture-in-picture (PiP) mode.
The bug causes audio to continue playing even after the user closes the PiP window.
Google developers have already created a fix for the bug, and it’s currently being tested in Chrome Canary.
If you use Google Chrome on your Android tablet, you might have encountered an annoying bug with picture-in-picture mode where audio continues playing even after the PiP window is closed. Fortunately, that behavior could change soon.
A new commit has been made to the Chromium Gerrit, aimed specifically at fixing this bug (via PiunikaWeb). According to the commit notes, audio playback should not continue in the background since closing a PiP window signals an “explicit user intent to stop playback.”
It’s worth noting that on Android phones, closing a PiP window suspends audio playback, as one might expect. However, on tablet devices, this behavior is blocked by the “kAndroidEnableBackgroundMediaLargeFormFactors” feature flag, resulting in the bug.
Currently, if a user closes a PiP window on their Android tablet, they have to manually stop audio playback either from the notifications pane or by opening the YouTube app and pausing playback there. Once the new commit is rolled out in Chrome, users will no longer have to resort to these steps, as Chrome will automatically stop audio playback when the PiP window is closed.
As of this writing, the change has been merged into Chrome Canary (v153.0.7991.0). It could take a while for the change to make its way to Chrome Dev and Beta builds before finally landing on the stable channel.
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