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I guess I don't know enough about how WMs work. :(

I'm curious how the WM could detect that the a portion of a window is playing video, and break that out into it's own movable window?

I'm not sure how you do that without the browser managing that.

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But you don't want it to be limited to plain video players - videoconferencing apps, games, and various real-time data displays etc are good fits to pip too. You are able to pipify any window without the app having to explicitly support it.

I think the main point of this feature is that it breaks the video out from a window in the existing page.

I can then interact with that video separately from the page. I can scroll around on the page, I can open other links. It decouples the video from the page.

There's lots of ways to open new chromeless window, or set a window always-on-top. That totally makes sense to be in a wm, but that's not all this is doing, right?

It can't. (on some platforms, the video ends up on a compositor subsurface, but so can many other portions of an app so trying to make a PiP feature out of that would probably not work well)

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