As YouTube turns 12, it celebrated the milestone with a new design and introducing new features.
First of all, YouTube redesigns its desktop interface by taking advantage of Google's Material Design. With the design language, YouTube incorporates cleaner and simpler design with consistencies across devices.
Here, the left-hand side navigational elements can be hidden with just a click on the hamburger icon. This makes the appearance similar to YouTube on mobile. There are also three new sections at the top: Home, Trending and Subscription that adds to users' existing Your Library.
The update also tweaks the search and channel pages, updated theater mode for watching videos in large players without having to go fullscreen, and enables users to scroll an endless list of recommendation on YouTube's homepage.
Then there is a new Dark Theme.
First spotted a month earlier, the feature allows users to change the overall appearance of YouTube to dark and mostly black. Previously, users were required to make a few changes to their Chrome browser to use it, but with the update, they can activate the feature by switching a toggle on the site itself.
Turning YouTube's white background to black, offers better viewing experience when using YouTube at dark environment, like for example when the lights are out or at night. With less glare, it’s easier on the eyes and with less distraction, users can better see the video's colors.
The biggest change is YouTube in using Polymer, an open-source JavaScript library that Google introduced years earlier.
The project to build YouTube on Polymer started a year ago. While it may not be that visible to users, it really changed the aspect of YouTube's design because Polymer allows web components to be re-used so they can be applied more quickly.
So here, YouTube can improve latency by making the site at least a bit faster.
"Things that get built once can then be reapplied more quickly," explained Manuel Bronstein, VP of Product Management at YouTube, of Polymer. "It's less about a particular feature, and it’s more about the velocity of which things can be brought to market. This then enables us to explore and then do more things."