YouTube says goodbye to decade-old video player UI, but users hate the new design
YouTube says goodbye to decade-old video player UI, but users hate the new design
That's always the case.
That's *always* the case.
Maybe there’s a reason for that. The word “enshitification” doesn’t exist in a void.
The removal of the black gradient at the bottom is a plus.
Putting the controls in their own grey capsules so they still standout is a plus.
The moving of the volume button to the right is a negative.
I dont like change just for changes sake, but in fairness some of this is a good idea and a welcome design shift. I just hopebthey move the volume button back as having on the left with the main controls is pretty widespread and common design.
A rare, levelheaded take.
The changes are fine. Nothing earth shattering, nothing wildly or fundamentally broken, just a visual update to better fit with Google’s new material design language.
The articles mentions that scroll and the arrow keys no longer adjust volume. Nothing could be earth shattering because it's video streaming software, but it does seem to come with some functionality loss at this stage.
On top od that it takes more vertical space so more % of the video is covered by controls that are not that transparent so the whole control block is covering it in full comparing to previous where only the actual icons and text did cover the video with the gradient to help make it visible if video is the same color.
But one way or another I avoid yt so it doesnt really affect me.
I only think they should have moved the controls outside of the video, at least on desktop
It's been a few years sine youtube stopped making changes designed for desktop. These days they work with a "Made for tablet, compatible for desktop" mindset.
I'm not defending google here, but I'm sure a decent chunk of the complaints are just removed because "change bad!"
I haven't seen the change yet and I'm sure there are legitimate complaints as well, but us online folk tend to detest even the smallest changes and go a bit overboard in our complaining sometimes.
"you can no longer hover on the volume slider and scroll or even use the up/down keys to adjust the audio"
The only legitimate complaint I have is I use a 4k monitor at 150% scaling. YouTube, in its design genius, decided that it should show me three videos per row, at like half the screen.
Thankfully with Google I was able to find something that helps
Honestly thank you for posting that link. I thought i had gone crazy thinking that i had only now just noticed the shit UX of 3 videos per row
The adverts on youtube have become so unbearable so no amount of UI change will convince me to use it as intended. If there's a long video I want to watch, I download the video first and watch it using VLC
Chrome user? No ad blocker?
Is it really a decade old? Feels like they redesign it every three years.
Redesigning familiar UIs is a great way to give elderly, neurodivergent, and/or computer illiterate people a hard time.
In their defense, I'm not sure I have ever seen a major UI redesign of some piece of software that the users of that software actually liked, at least at first. Inertia and muscle memory are powerful things.
Hence the reason why you make small gradual improvements over a long time. YT has been around a long time, and Google should know better.
Well the old Google development company would know better, the new Google advertising agency doesn't give a shit
How is that in their defense?? You reveal them for the gross imcompetents that, and almost all developpers are.
If foreign strangers impose changes on my motor cortex then my prescription is to give them flamethrower enemas.
Stop it, just stop it! Or else!
People hate two things the most: things changing and things staying the same.
exactly one comes to mind: blender
ugh, this is so much worse. takes up more space, is more distracting.
I want to be able to skip around in videos and not have the screen covered by ugly pill buttons
At least it's not covered by a dark shade now. 👍 I'm initially for this change. Good to see an iteration. Let's see how it goes.
Yeah. It also looks like the buttons might light up on hover, but they already basically do that so that's only a very small plus. I too remember being annoyed about not seeing content behind the shade properly.
The change is so they can now implement the 38 hour ad before every 30 second video. And then another 21 hour ad every 7 seconds while watching the video. The ad can’t be stopped, skipped or muted and automatically plays full screen on all your devices and monitors at the same time.
Black Mirror Episode
The huge Thumb nails on the home page are ridiculous. Makes it harder to find content I want to watch. If you zoom out it will only show 4 horizontal thumbnails, Max.
Agreed. It feels like a UI designed for little children or senior citizens.
There’s an Extension for chrome that fixes this luckily.
What is it called?
I hate that at normal zoom it gives 3 and at 4 it gets slightly too small to read quickly.
I don't think yt-dlp+mpv changed much...
That's a lot of effort when you can just freetube.
Everyone has their preferred way, innit.
It looks exactly the same just a little different skin
I prefer the old one, but it's really not much of a difference. New one looks a bit cheaper, like something you'd see on piracy sites or something.
Also just realised Jellyfin basically has the old YouTube design. Don't know if YT was first with it, but if so it was pretty influential, think it's quite common in many players.
Oh man, I remember when this was the new one
YouTube can do whatever they want, you think that give a damn about the people? Noooopppppeeeee
And you think people will do anything more than just removed about it? Noooopppppeeeee
With recent events, yeeeeeeep. More and more people are protesting with their wallets. Either google getting told to break off companies and/or sell them (e.g. Chrome), they’re going to make some crazy moves for your dollar and that will trigger the peak of the outcry and you’ll see it happen. It’s not a noppppe or yepppp situation, it’s “when”. Better now than later.
People literally always hate changes to ui. It's to the point that this article could have been written and just archived somewhere to pull out whenever something changes.
When a developpers changes an UI without written consent of every single user, he should be treated like a witch at Salem
Looks the same to me on a PC. Up/down arrows still adjust the volume. Scroll wheel on my mouse scrolls the entire screen as always. Do the changes only affect touchscreen devices?
Same. Money says that people removed are on phones. Fair enough I guess, but I'm not fucking around watching video on a palm screen. I'll wait till I get home and have a 40" TV to view.
Things like this roll out to more people over time. It's clearly desktop, both from the screenshots and the fact people are complaining they can't use the scroll wheel to change the volume while hovering over the volume button. That's a desktop thing.
Apart from the key bind loss, which would be asinine to remove permanently, this looks like a straight upgrade. Better readability and more in line with the rest of the UI design.
What a great day to be a grayjay user lol
Neat, didn't notice since they perma banned me for watching without ads via freetube I believe.
Ive just been downloading videos direct with yt-dlp, but I think I'm going to extend it into a bash script which fetches the RSS of the channels I want, downloads them if they haven't been downloaded, and then deletes them after they have been watched and after a certain amount of time has passed, or if I have marked them for deletion.
I'm using Pinchflat to do that as well. It can download vídeos from Youtube channels I follow using yt-dlp and checks automatically fpr new videos. Check it out, it might be similar to what you want to do
Wonderful, not surprised it exists already, Thanks!
Ive just been downloading videos direct with yt-dlp, but I think I’m going to extend it into a bash script which fetches the RSS of the channels I want, downloads them if they haven’t been downloaded, and then deletes them after they have been watched and after a certain amount of time has passed, or if I have marked them for deletion.
I wrote something a while back in bash that pulls down a channel with yt-dlp, remembers already-downloaded stuff, and doesn't redownload. Has a menu interface showing a list of "subscribed" channels to pull from. If you want, I'll throw you a copy.
I'd do stuff like this with caution, as YouTube temp-IP-banned me from anonymous use for something like a month after I sucked down the contents of an enormous channel in a relatively-short time. At the very least, I'd suggest having it put a cap on how much it downloads by default so that you don't inadvertently pull down way more than expected and run into trouble with YouTube. My own script doesn't presently have such a cap.
I'm currently yanking everything over a VPN connection from a provider that I trust and I'm not collecting anything as enormous as entire channels. With this considered along with the fact that this is outside the bounds of a user account (I don't believe EULA can come into play as a result), I don't think I could get in much trouble with them outside of having to change VPN endpoints occasionally if they decide to block out some IP (On one or two occasions I have gotten a message back from yt-dlp noting to sign in to prove I am not a bot).
I appreciate the offer on the script, however I think I will build my own as it is not an urgent matter for me and I consider it a good exercise in practicing my skills with programming. I've been looking to build my own RSS reader for a while, and I think this is probably a good use case for this as well.
Thanks!
It's your IPv6. If you change to IPv4-only they do not ban.
You can check with ip addr if it shows v6 addresses. You then can disable them by various means. Had to do the same to reeable freetube and yt-dlp.
yay browser plugins
I'm indifferent to it. The jarring years were 2006 up to about 2015. It would shift between better and worse until it reached the point where the front page was all clickbait/ragebait/advertisements and you had to rely on your own subscriptions page. Every social media site should default to subscribed/followed stuff for logged in users but got to selll paid to promote content
I don't know why anyone would willingly default to the algorithm, I set my bookmark direct to the subscription page.
as always with corporate shit
new coke problems
Oh god.....I still don't understand how coke came out of that fiasco ahead of pepsi. Hell, I thought R.C. Cola would lap them.
The heck is this title?
YouTube says goodbye to decade-old video player UI, but users hate the new design
Meanwhile, the article itself just cites a few tiny aesthetic changes and like four random Reddit comments. Doesn't seem like they even tried it themself... That's justifications for 460 upvotes?
Looks like they just adopted material you design. It's a 'whatever' change for me.
It looks like the status bars window manager users tend to customize
The old and the new UI still auto hides controls and the seekbar and timestamp. I hate that it hides those! Besides remember when the seekbar showed where the Ads were in marking those sections in yellow? Good times.
Youtube: ......
Everyone else: .......
Youtube: LETS FUCK SHIT UP!!!
This ain't a problem with PipePipe
the new design looks like it came from ten years ago
Judging from screenshots in this article, it doesn't seem to loose or gain any functionality: all of the same controls are present.
With this in mind.
Who cares!? It's neither good nor bad. It's like the thing with playback line color. Yes, it's different, no, I didn't notice until some pointed it out, no, I couldn't care less.
I don't use the youtube app but I've hated every new redesign. Bring back the old ui
I don't think it's too bad. I can imagine those with some slight visual impairments it might've been awkward to see the buttons some times without a background for them
It's like the same but with a background color that has rounded corners.
Just like they used to combat rw disinformation
Is it changed for get the transcript?
Oh so is that why I sometimes have to wait for a minute now before I can play a video?
stupid transcript button
I don't think it looks terrible, but it does look like windows media player from 20 years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbiIBcUD1VY This video provides a step-by-step guide on how to revert a new, undesirable layout to a previous version. The instructions are presented in a sequential manner, utilizing links provided in the video description to install necessary components and configure settings.
use the transcriptly to get this video transcript and summary.
It look sexy.
I think so too, and we are entitled to our opinion.