In the past, all browsers used to limit you to one website per window; if you wanted to open another website, you either had to replace the current website or open a new window. Then came along tabs, which allowed you to open multiple websites in the same window — one website per tab. Now you can take it one step further in Chrome by opening multiple websites in the same tab or window. Read on to learn more.

Picture in Picture Viewer (PiP) is the Chrome extension that allows you to open multiple pages inside the same tab or window.

Check out the PiP extension’s page here. From that page, click on the +Free option to install the extension, and restart the browser. Then input chrome://flags in the address bar to open the page below. Locate Enable Panels, choose Enable and then click the Relaunch Now option at the bottom of the page.

Then open a website such as Google, and click on the PiP bookmarklet near the top right of the Chrome window, to open the page in a floating panel. That should open a small panel window which can be dragged to alternative positions. Click the minimize icon to minimize it to the PiP taskbar icon.

Hover the cursor over the PiP taskbar icon, and click the panel’s thumbnail preview to reopen it. Then input an alternative URL in the address bar. When another page has opened, click PiP bookmarklet. Alternatively, click the PiP bookmarklet at the top right of the browser to open a separate panel address bar. There you can add URLs to open new panels with alternative websites.

Another way that you can open a page in a panel is by inputting #panel at the end of its URL (Universal Resource Locator). For example, www.google.com#panel. That will close the page in the main window, and open a new panel.

The extension also has three customization options.  Right-click the bookmarklet, and then select Options to open the page below. There you can untick Enable Mobile View to stop pages opening as mobile versions, or disable the video player view.

Overall, it’s an effective extension, although there are a few issues as is stated on its page, “Don’t do right click in a PiP window, your chrome will crash, fixed in Chrome Canary v33.0.1703.0.” In addition, “You should open PiP window from a video link directly instead of opening Youtube home page in panel window.”

Enjoy and let us know if you have any similar solutions for other browsers.