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YouTube says goodbye to decade-old video player UI, but users hate the new design
(www.androidauthority.com)
That's always the case.
this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
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I mean, they could stop messing with things that aren't broken for once...
Eh, it’s a fine line tbh. Not that I enjoy defending Google.
You get both “this UI hasn’t changed in a decade” and “this UI is perfect never change it” in relatively equal amounts. The rest honestly don’t care either way.
Imagine if they actually brought back "options" and let you choose between changes rather than force them on you.
That would turn into spaghetti code and unmaintainable tech debt really fast. Now every time you make a change you have to make sure it doesn't break previous stylesheets, or you need to run different versions of the same codebase for each stylesheet that will need updating for security vulnerabilities and stakeholder whims.
Not really. At least if you plan to have it customizable in the first place.
Then it becomes harder to change when you want to add in new features still. There needs to be a fine balance between giving options and having a clean single-option code, and offering 2 different video players is not it (it sounds like some shortcuts got broken so it's not just a CSS that got applied)
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Because the seek bar overlaps the video as it is playing, and because the drag button is huge whenever you mouseover it, it is much harder to locate chapter marker visually.
Change for the sake of change is not good.
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I'm not defending google here, but I'm sure a decent chunk of the complaints are just bitching 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"
That, for sure, is one of the most garbage changes imaginable.
Someone conciously had to go out of their way to remove functionality there.
Maybe there's a reason for it, but I still think it's a shit change.
Speaking as a software dev, that’s probably not the case. They probably started completely from scratch and so the inclusion of features depends on reimplementing them on the new platform. It could be as simple as not being ready yet or maybe stats show them that so few people use the feature that they don’t find it worth reimplementing it.
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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
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the new design looks like it came from ten years ago
What a great day to be a grayjay user lol
stupid transcript button
Looks like they just adopted material you design. It's a 'whatever' change for me.
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.
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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.
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
Oh man, I remember when this was the new one
I don't think it looks terrible, but it does look like windows media player from 20 years ago.