YouTube rolls out refreshed web player

Shawn Knight

Posts: 15,240   +192
Staff member

If you’ve visited YouTube today and noticed something different, you aren’t alone. The Google-owned company has given its web-based video player a sleek new makeover that scores high in the aesthetics department.

The first thing you’ll notice is the transparent control bar which disappears completely after a few seconds of inactivity on your part, just like on mobile. The timeline bar is thin until you mouse over it, making it slightly larger and easier to manipulate.

The settings menu has also been reworked slightly, again, giving it a more mobile-like feel.

Astute viewers may also notice that the “watch later” button has vanished; that’s only partially true. To get to the old feature, enlarge a clip to fullscreen view and look for it in the top right of the video.

YouTube first unveiled its new video player back in April albeit only to a limited number of users. It didn’t take long before someone figured out a simple hack to force the new UI to appear. YouTube eventually rolled the feature out to a larger audience via its TestTube beta experience.

Now, it appears the new UI has been rolled out to everyone on a global scale. I’ve tried the site locally using a couple of different browsers and was able to see the revamped layout each and every time.

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Well, it doesn't feel as broken as the last one. The only gripe I have is I can't see the timeline without the mouse moving on the video...
 
Actually, Google has rolled out this new player back in April. I guess it's slow news day.
 
Actually, Google has rolled out this new player back in April. I guess it's slow news day.
it was beta only back then. this is global.

I like the new player, it looks nice and it also feels faster (placebo maybe?)
twitch's new html5 player is also extremely similar to this.
 
I definitely noticed the change, especially when you want to edit your comments, it takes multiple tries to click on the edit button sometimes, it just disappears.
 
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