YouTube says goodbye to decade-old video player UI, but users hate the new design

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 bitching 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.
  
  Yes, I don't get how watching videos on tiny screens is so popular. Seems like self-imposed misery.

as always with corporate shit

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

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.

stupid transcript button

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.
- 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 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!

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

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.
- 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!
  
  LOL, nailed it.
  I'm still bitter about browsers removing backspace for previous page. How was that hard to maintain?!
- 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

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

I don't think it looks terrible, but it does look like windows media player from 20 years ago.

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 new design looks like it came from ten years ago

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 bitch 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.
  
  Viewers can't do shit but watch where the creators are. Up to creators to organize. I see tubers bitching about payment and copyright. Can cry me a river, if they only offer videos on a single platform.
  I was perfectly fine with YouTube before monetization.

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
- My ad blocker stops all the ads except for the sponsorships that are in the video... Y'all watching YouTube without blockers?
  
  Sponsorblock usually helps with that.
  
  Try adding SponsorBlock.
  
  It's more difficult to block ads if you're casting to a television so downloading is better for my use case
- Chrome user? No ad blocker?

Looks like they just adopted material you design. It's a 'whatever' change for me.

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.

What a great day to be a grayjay user lol

That's always the case.
- 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.
- 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.
  
  I'm sure someone will release an addon or some custom CSS to fix it.

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.

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.
- 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
- "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.
  
  You could do that before?
- The article has pics if you want a preview
  
  It looks quite nice actually
  
  Thanks, but it won't really affect me. I only use Freetube when I want to access Youtube

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

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?

It looks exactly the same just a little different skin

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.
- Revanced or Firefox with ublock, no more ads
  
  Add Sponsorblock (included in Revanced) to skip in-video sponsor segments as well as self-marketing, recaps, etc if you want.
  
  Does ublock remove the in-video ad Breaks for you? Never worked for me

yay browser plugins

Youtube: ......
Everyone else: .......
Youtube: LETS FUCK SHIT UP!!!

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.