For any video app or service, a queue is an essential feature. The laws of the world don't apply to YouTube though, and the online streaming giant has thrived without a proper queue for years. Users got algorithm-approved videos to play next and that was it. But YouTube seems to now be aware, all of a sudden, that it should add the feature and so it's working on it. It's in temporary testing on the web and anyone can give it a try.

How to turn on YouTube's video queue

Some users might have already seen a hint to try queues while navigating through the site. I'll admit that it popped up in front of me a couple of times over the past few days, but I quickly dismissed it because I was in a hurry to get to a video. That only happened on one of my accounts though. On the others, which I use more often, the suggestion never showed up.

Bottom left card suggesting you try out the new queue feature.

If you get the tooltip, the feature is already active for you. If not though, you need to go to youtube.com/new and click the blue Try it out button to enable it.

Click the "Try it out" blue button.

How to add videos to the queue

Once the feature is enabled, any video on YouTube, be it in search results, in a channel, in the regular Up Next list, on the home page, or anywhere, will have a new Add to queue option in the overflow menu. Choose that and the video will pop up in the floating miniplayer on the bottom right.

Above: Adding a video to the queue. Below: Miniplayer controls.

Managing the queue

The miniplayer in this has an expanding bottom bar where you'll find all your queued up videos. Hover over any of them and you can remove it or click and drag to re-order things as you see fit. If you want to close the current queue, you need to click the x button in the miniplayer.

Above: Re-arranging and removing videos from the expanded queue. Below: Closing it.

YouTube says it will be testing the video queue until September 10, so you have about two weeks to use it and send the team your feedback. Presumably, if the tests are deemed positive, queue management will later — but hopefully soon — roll out to everyone. There's no word on it coming to mobile platforms yet, but since YouTube already has a queue manager that only shows up when you're connected to a Chromecast, it shouldn't be too hard to enable the feature all the time.