Facebook has a new feature in place, adding a "floating" video option similar to what YouTube already offers.
More specifically, videos that appear in your Facebook News Feed now have a new button in their bottom right, next to the button for full screen.
The icon looks like a square and appears when you mouse-over while playing the video, Techmeme creator Adam Haworth noticed, as The Next Web (TNW) reports.
Clicking on the icon will make the video pop out in the bottom left of your screen, allowing it to remain visible even if you keep scrolling down your News Feed (see image above).
In other words, the video will follow you around, albeit it will be in a tiny window. Users can move that window anywhere on their screen. You can't, however, pull the video out of the browser window.
At the same time, if you navigate to another page on Facebook, such as your messages or events or such, the video will no longer follow you around. The feature only works as long as you browse through your News Feed.
When it comes to the video window itself, it's pretty simple and straightforward: it retains buttons for play/pause and close, and offers an option to Like or share it with others.
One of the drawbacks of this experimental feature is the fact that you can't resize the video window, and the pop-out is rather tiny to see in detail. On the other hand, if you've decided to have the video float around while you keep scrolling, perhaps a tiny window is more suitable.
If this functionality sounds familiar, it's because YouTube already offers this feature on its mobile apps, allowing users to have a video play in a small window while they continue to navigate within the app.
As opposed to YouTube's option, Facebook's new floating videos feature currently works only on the desktop, so those who use Facebook mobile apps will not be able to enjoy it. At the same time, each new feature rolls out gradually and this floating videos feature is no exception, which means that not all Facebook users get it from the very beginning.
