Try out a fresh look for YouTube | Hacker News Reader

Try out a fresh look for YouTube

youtube.com

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The problem with youtube is that like a search engine it only highlights a tip of the huge of amount of videos they have. You can't filter by tags, you don't have sub categories, the main categories are broad, the search functionality is basic. Sometimes searching a specific video title will give you a whole bunch of video with different titles before you get the one that has a 100% match. It's like being in a library, you know they have what you want, but no one can find it. That's not only true to youtube but to the Apple Store, to iTunes, to Google Play store... I installed an alternative google play store app the other day and was surprised to find how many amazing apps are out there that I had never seen on the Google Play store. It's 2017... give me tools to filter your data!

What's the point of having a new interface that does the same or less as the old interface?

Amazon and ebay are one of the few sites that do it well.

What was the Google Play store alternative you tried? Please do share. I always search the Play store via browser, because it sucks on the phone.

Youtube search engine is absolutely disastrous. Think of a band (no matter how obscure). Search for "[band] live" and sort by upload date. Good luck scrolling through hundreds and hundreds of spam "streams" before you find an actual video. No option to disable searching for these "streams" either.

The only thing I saw was "your browser is not supported, try Google Chrome". It's not exactly "new experience" - I still remember "this site works best in browser X" and "under construction" banners :)

Worked here with Firefox 53.0

Try Firefox for Android.

This. The Google Earth thing from last week could be justified as "requires some NaCl shebang that only Chrome does", but requiring Chrome for a new Youtube layout is pretty hard to explain away as "technical requirements".

They're not requiring Chrome, Safari works fine for me.

Almost the same as old look but more "mobile": large buttons, more whitespace. More "modern google" design which has some unsettling feel: it's cold and faceless, it's corporate. This "mobile-first" design is political: they're saying that desktop is obsolete, saying to switch to Android and Chromebook — platforms where you can only consume content and click ads. Minimalism in UI says that you should only press "play" and chill — you don't need more.

So, suitable design for the largest internet zombie television service.

I like the new Autoplay toggle. Autoplay is honestly the most annoying feature I've ever seen in a top-20 modern website. Anyone have theories as to why it received such amazing enough A/B-testing results that they decided to keep it?

It helps them report a higher number of ad impressions, from preroll and overlay ads that are on the next video, as people are scrambling to hit pause.

On the other hand, plenty of people do watch YouTube semi-passively, and autoplay enables that usecase to work without requiring repeated interaction.

I've had trouble with this new look on my Surface Pro (in Chrome) - can't "long-press" to activate right-click functionality. Does anyone else have this problem?

I just recently decided to start building a personal project on Polymer. I wish I could find a template built in Polymer 2 that shows off as many features as the shop template.

https://github.com/Polymer/shop/tree/2.0-preview/src - you mean this?

This is exactly what I was hoping someone would show me. But, and forgive me as I'm still very much a newb at Polymer, but isn't the syntax for 2

class MyApp extends Polymer.Element { }

this is still using the

Polymer({ })

would it be possible to just update to the latest version and syntax?

This is hybrid application - works on both 1.x and 2.x - they did remove some unnecessary 1.x-only calls from the application.

You can find the examples in main polymer documentation - I'd expect that lots of existing elements will be migrated to hybrid - so you will still see the old syntax for backwards compatibility.

Of particular interest is that this is written using Polymer!

Looks like they're bringing the desktop browser experience more closely in line with what you get in the app.

I guess I'm not a target user, but what do you use a youtube app for you can't do loading the site in the browser?

Cast it to a TV (for non-chrome users)

Could you elaborate a bit? Does this mean the phone proxies the video to the TV instead of the TV connecting directly to the youtube service?

There are two different versions of Casting that I'm aware of. One is using a Chromecast (or something that exposes itself like a Chromecast, such as the new Vizio tvs). In which case your device is essentially acting as a remote that's negotiating the stream to execute, but the stream itself is between the Chromecast device and the source, not proxied via the phone. Once it's going, your phone or Chrome browser no longer has anything to do with it (unless you use it as a remote to change the stream or pause it or whatever). There is a special case where you can cast your device screen itself. In which case your phone is the source the Chromecast is negotiating with, rather than an external service.

The other version of casting is using the Miracast protocol, in which case the TV is just a wireless display that's showing what's on the phone or Chrome browser's screen. My last TV supported Miracast and it was really handy to get around the fact that Amazon is too anti-competitive to make a Chromecast app for their Instant Video service.

For me, a big one is being able to get only the audio stream of a video. Then, I can listen to it while my phone is locked, saving both power and data.

This usually requires either a 3rd-party app, or a subscription to Youtube Red, and obviously has no direct analogue on a laptop/desktop.

Watch videos on my 4th generation iPad, for one thing. It doesn't seem like there should be that much of a difference between the app and the mobile site, but loading the latter in Safari makes it shit the bed (my guess is lack of RAM), whereas the former works just fine - go figure.

Just what we all begged for: More whitespace, less content. Thanks Google, we can always count on you.

That's weird, for me it has less whitespace and more content.

> Your browser is not supported. Try it with the latest Google Chrome.

Err, this is chrome, version 49 to be exact.

Version 49 was released 14 months ago, so that's not really the "latest" Chrome...

Version 58 here on android 4.4.2, same message.

A latest generation iPhone is apparently not good enough for this new experience.

Sounds like a bug with feature detection (YT had a few like that in the past I believe).

Is this truly fresh? I think I've been seeing this design for awhile...

They managed to make it worse. Try clicking on hamburger menu to toggle the left nav. Watch that hamburger menu disappear, and now there's gray overlay over main content.

In order to collapse the menu and cancel out my action, I need to move my mouse over the gray area and click.

How is that an improvement?

Google makes terrible UI.

Google Play Music player was great when it came out. Then they made it worse by making table row so tall, you can only view 7 songs without scrolling. It took them year and half to go back to the original table row height.

Yikes. I'll stay away then; thanks. I think the biggest issue is that they mess around with good things (like the Play Music UI as you noted) too often and end up sticking with it seemingly out of pride before relenting. The Android YouTube app was also refreshed recently and it looks awful now.

1.02mb in just DOM alone. Good lord. I know Polymer is heavy, but still.

I never understood why our web sites are so bloated compared to those of other multi billion dollar portal companies.

Look at naver.com and their just redesigned site and source. Or their celeb video portal www.vlive.tv.

Entertainingly, the size for naver.com and youtube.com are the same for me, both reaching 1.6MB (without caching). As far as I can see, the only difference is that for naver.com, 1.3MB are for images with 0.3MB for the page whereas with youtube.com only 0.6MB are for images and 1MB is for the page.

Are you testing under firefox? They are serving some crazy HTML for it - chrome gets much smaller source... like three times smaller.

For me, it's about the same between Chrome and Firefox. 1.7MB worth of HTML,css,inline js, ton of json.

Interesting, i get 50kb gzipped in chrome, and 150kb gzipped in firefox.

Polymer is 35kb, and the markup in my applications has same size roughly that I do with react or angular 1.x. You sure you measured things correctly? That being said 1MB of DOM... It kind of looks machine generated - icon definitions seem to be served in source, and other resources - this makes no sense to me.

I'm getting thee times bigger html file served under firefox than chrome, looks like a bug.

Wow, I certainly hope not. I opened up Chrome DOM inspector, clicked "Edit as HTML", selected all and copied, pasted into code editor, and saved the file as HTML. The file quickly grows as soon as you take any action and load more DOM. One quick scroll, and I was already up to 1.65MB.

it really took them a decade to discover that a dark mode is easier on the eyes?

I try to avoid youtube's web interface like the plague, and just use youtube-dl as much as possible.

Why?

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