YouTube player redesign – yet again

It’s been only a few weeks since Google changed YouTube’s design, and now it’s time for a player overhaul.

This is how the old player used to look like:

And this is how it looks now on their website:

It’s supposed to be less complex than the old one, but to be honest I find the fading animation a little annoying.

Personally I find the progress bar changing back to size as soon as you move the cursor over somewhat annoying as well, but it might be just me.

Not all videos are using it yet, I’ve seen some that still have the old player, so I guess it’s gonna take a while before even the embeded player gets the new design too.

There are some advantages to the new player though, as you can see in the pictures the sound bar is now horizontal, so there’s no chance of ending up clicking on the video screen instead of the volume bar, or the volume bar not showing up at all. Also, the progress bar appears to glide better, at least on the videos I tried.

I still feel Vimeo and Dailymotion’s player have a better design, but YouTube is onto something here, they’re not just there yet.

Of course there’s still the business of the sucky layout, so I really hope somebody comes up with a better one, this one is too confusing and fugly, to say the least.