Aside’s upcoming update on macOS makes picture-in-picture a native system window

The Aside browser’s next update on macOS is set to turn picture-in-picture (PiP mode) into a real system window. In simpler terms, it won’t work like a regular browser overlay. Instead, it’ll act like a separate window entirely.

Dora Lee, the co-founder and CTO of the Aside company, posted a demo of the feature in action on X. We have attached the video below for your reference.

In the clip, a YouTube video keeps playing in a small floating window while the user leaves the tab, opens Aside’s docs, and moves to Settings. The media player can be dragged around the desktop, and it shows the usual macOS Play/Pause/Close controls. This change is presumably in a Canary or testing build of the Aside AI browser at the moment.

At the time of writing, it hasn’t shipped to the stable version, and the original post mentions that it will be available in the next upcoming version.

The current version of PiP on the Aside browser is already completely functional. It can easily be resized; you can drag it anywhere you want, and it stays open even if you minimize the browser. However, there’s one clear difference to the upcoming version.

The updated version will use the native media control buttons that belong to macOS. The stable version uses a different set of buttons to control the PiP window. The new version even has Apple’s transparent Liquid Glass aesthetic for the buttons.

For Chromium browsers, the PiP window still belongs to the browser, but Aside has figured out a way to use the native macOS window. It’ll behave exactly like a system player, so it won’t have as many bugs or inconsistencies within the operating system.

The post only mentions macOS. There’s no mention of PiP improvements on Windows at the moment, though a Windows version of Aside was recently released with nearly total feature parity with macOS. We covered that here.

The Aside browser is focused on speed. It recently got much lighter on paper (more on that here). It also has features such as a built-in ad blocker.

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