YouTube's desktop version is getting a redesign, allowing users to experience a new "Material Design" revamp, which is expected to make the popular video-sharing "easier and more fun to use."
According to YouTube, the new design is aimed at delivering "a beautiful, delightful and intuitive user experience" with three key principles: simplicity, consistency and beauty. YouTube has ditched its traditional card design in the latest overhaul while embracing a simple white background with hardly any visual distractions. The nice shadow under the main search bar at the top of the screen is a visible implementation of the Material Design, a unified system for all Google products announced three years ago in Android 5.0.
The redesigned YouTube also comes with a "Dark Theme," which replaces the white user interface with a black one. The new dark mode can be activated from the new profile menu, which can be accessed after clicking on the user's profile picture in the top right corner of the screen.
"Developed to cut down on glare and let you take in the true colors of the videos you watch, Dark Theme turns your background dark throughout your entire YouTube experience," YouTube said.
YouTube's new site design is built on Google's Polymer framework, a lightweight JavaScript library to take full advantage of Web Components to create Material Design-style apps on the Web. According to YouTube, the faster Polymer framework "enables quicker feature development from here on out," and the dark mode is one of the first new features developed on Polymer.
However, the new design is not automatically available to everyone. Interested users can opt-in to preview the design at youtube.com/new. If you want to return to the current design, select "Restore classic YouTube" from the Account Menu.
Meanwhile, YouTube is counting on your feedback before a wider rollout of the new design takes place.
"We're still working on the new site, so we hope you'll try it out now and let us know what you think," YouTube said, adding that more powerful new features are coming to the platform in near future.
