Hacker News Reader

This is simply wrong. Videos are still rendering in overlays in windows in Chrome right now. There are many reasons why overlays are still used.

[citation needed]

If video rendering used overlays, then YouTube could not put the toolbar or subtitles on top of the video, and they’ve been doing so for a long time.

The toolbar and subtitles are in a separate plane that gets composited on top.

>In today's Chrome, when a device supports hardware overlays, we promote at most one video's frames to hardware overlays.

Modern overlay systems support alpha compositing. The video is placed behind and the elements (toolbar etc) are in front with an alpha hole.