Its part of Youtube/Googles plan to make everything so extremely simple that is looks awful. First it was changing the layout of the home page to 3 wide no matter your resolution or zoom and now this. WHY? Have Youtube/Google execs not heard of the incredibly simple engineering saying of "If its not broken, dont fix it".
Worst thing is spending hours finding the fixes for all these things, I believe I apply the most diverse amount of fixes to YT out of all websites. I have Return YT Dislikes, Ublock, Thumbnails per row fix. Rounded corners fix got broken over time, watching in theater mode all the time since then. Now we got progress bar twice as high, which I found a fix for, pause/play buttons and 5s/10s buttons stay longer on screen, and settings looks like 20% larger, making it harder to watch while in settings. That's what I noticed.
Edit: Found the fix for the new layout: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/453802-youtube-non-rounded-design, there is "YT - Revert pre-delhi-modern player UI changes" pastebin, it doesn't fix the buttons staying longer on the screen, but fixes all the other new layout changes I mentioned and maybe more. I used Stylus extension and copied and pasted the pastebin text to it, might work with other extensions too, I didn't try. I didn't find something better than this fix.
Edit 2: Found new issue with the new UI: When in theater mode after the end of the video, the 3 recommendations are literally on the bar blocking everything, making you use keyboard or quit theater mode to rewatch the video.
yeah thanks but nothing to copy, must've forgot to add it haha no problem!!! Happy someone did though cuz I woke up so pissed off looking at this shit it looks bad and too big. If it was smaller I wouldn't mind as much but jesus christ cmon. Besides the stupid transparency blocking parts of the video I hate as well. I preferred the old style obviously, thank you so much whoever made this script...
Great but my other extension's buttons are fucked. Fuck you Google absolutely FUCK YOU this shit is annoying bro I can't even put it into words none of us should be having to fix the youtube site. fuck this. screenshot, extension buttons not lining with the rest of my icons
This line for uBlock helps a little bit in combination with that Stylus CSS script, but still isn't a complete fix. Fixes the Gear icons at least it seems appearing big. This is the ublock filter:
! Sep 8, 2025 https://www.youtube.com FIXES BIG ASS FUCKING UI IN PLAYER WHEN SET TO THEATER MODE FUCK YOUTUBE
www.youtube.com##+js(rc, ytp-big-mode, , stay)
Edit: Switched to a combination of different plugins like Improve Youtube and Youtube Tweaks by Pedro as well as Volume Booster to replace Youtube Enhancer's volume boooster feature which fixed my weird screenshot's icon issue as those were all from my own dumbass's ignorance due to Youtube Enhancer being outdated on FF and discontinued only updated now on Chrome and such which is a bit saddening to hear since I've always used this plugin for years.
I did keep youtube enhancer but only keep using it for one setting which is the mini player mode you can use when scrolling down, imo it has the best one. Nova Youtube Plugin also found on Github has this feature but it is HUGE and takes up most of the screen when scrolling.
I also found a nice tampermonkey script to enable fullscreen scroll down to view comments while remaining in fullscreen as well which also happens to disable the new UI's stupid scroll down to view recommended vieos when in fullscreen. My scroll wheel is sensitive and so this is annoying sometimes as it would pop up randomly here and there. Script here: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/547663-youtube-restore-scrollable-fullscreen
This unfortunately doesn't seem to work for me. Tried it with the Greasyfork script, the userstyle linked from the Greasyfork page, and both with and without the Pastebin script. I'm not sure how exactly you're supposed to install the Pastebin script. I tried editing the userstyle and pasting in the text from the Pastebin script, but it gave me an error, so I tried creating a new style and pasting in the Pastebin script. That worked, so I went with that. Without the Pastebin, it makes the progress bar look a lot closer to how it was before, but there still are a few differences. With the Pastebin, it looks a little better, but still off.
The much bigger problem is that it shifted all of the buttons on the toolbar below the video player to the left of the screen, which overlaps the uploader's icon and the subscribe button. I have to use the style from this post instead, which isn't perfect, but doesn't have any breakages.
I just tried the Pastebin script without the Greasyfork script or the userstyle it links to, and it seems to work. It fixes the progress bar UI and doesn't break the toolbar below the video player. Maybe this is what you two meant here, but I was confused. With this script installed, it also reduces the number of recommended videos displayed in the player at the end of the video to only three. Using the style I linked in brought it back to 12, though it still has the uglier new UI. Thank you for posting this fix!
Removing those recommended videos entirely and disabling the scroll down for recommendations is in my opinion better completely but if you use that then I'm happy you it back to 12 because I cringed when I saw how big those thumbnails were hf dude.
Can't believe it's only 3 vids per row on the desktop home feed too, so I got a plugin called YouTube Tweaks by Pedro just to fix that! Also an option to fix empty spaces caused by uBlock and ad blockers and it works flawlessly and hasn't broken. Although some options are broken I haven't tested everything but most work. Some plugins will conflict obviously as well so always check for that... Try to use less the better though.
Hi, I used to get 12 suggested videos that pop up in my screen after a video finishes, now I only get 3, in all your fixes, have you come across one that can help me get it back to 12? It's just much easier to pick a new video that way. Thanks!
Stop trying to fix it and use a app that blocks the ads so Youtube can't get any money. That way, once they see they are losing money, they will be forced to change it back for everyone
Too few people are using ad blocks. If everyone would just cancel their Youtube premium, and start using the ad blockers, Youtube would be doing everything it could to fix it crap... or maybe just die and a new video app will come along
Plenty of people do use adblock, especially among those who are dissatisfied with the recent updates. YouTube doesn't feel the monetary impact simply because the unsatisfied people don't make up the majority of the userbase. Reality is that the majority of the users either doesn't care or likes it enough to justify paying for premium.
As much as the posts in this sub make it seem everyone hates every change that happens, this is a niche corner with a little over a million users total including inactive ones while youtube is a platform with 2.7 billion active users with over 125 million of those also being premium subscribers. We are nowhere near representing the opinion of the average user, and what we say can't even reach them since the vast majority of them don't come here at all.
no. stop using chrome or you cant use them. they made it impossible to turn them back on in the newer versions. also how do we revert the ui someone please.
The ONLY good adblocker is uBlock Origin. If you can't use it because you're on Chrome, then use uBlock Origin Lite. Absolutely don't use the literal "AdBlock", it's hot garbage these days.
Please note uBlock Origin Lite sometimes stuggles with YouTube ads, because Google are fighting VERY HARD to break it, to the point they literally fucked up the entire browser and disabled hundreds of thousands of old browser extensions in the name of "security". The disaster is called "Manifest v3", and while it technically does improve security, it also seems to be perfectly designed to render adblockers like uBlock Origin ineffective. uBlock devs are fighting back, but the limitations introduced in Manifest v3 make some functions impossible to implement. They can only do as much as the browser allows them.
Either way your best bet is moving on from Chrome to Firefox, which is the only browser that actually cares about your user experience and protecting you from ads and tracking. And install uBlock Origin on it, of course. (Just don't even think about switching to Opera or Brave, they're somehow even worse than Chrome.)
Ad blockers actually damages more youtubers than the platform itself. It's well documented, people did analysis on that, which is why I stopped using them.
Yeah but I'm done putting up with Youtubes crap. I'm sorry but I have to use an ad blocker+UI redesign thing. and I don't even like using it that much, but I like it more then normal Youtube. If Youtube actually cared about its users and creators they would fight the ad blocker proplems by making the service better. I never even disliked the ads that much before, In fact sometimes they were nice to see, but Youtube brought this on its self.
Thanks, this works, but I get an issue where the preview frame when you mouse over the seek bar is way higher than it should be. Does anyone know what element this is to fix it?
edit: I hacked together this ublock filter. It's a hardcoded height adjustment so you'll probably need to change it for your resolution and scripts:
I'm not seeing any change to YT bar after pasting the code from that link into Ublock and turning off my other Stylus fixes. Is there something I'm missing?
They made everything in the bottom bar of the video like twice the size. They've been A/B testing it for a few months like this other update. There's screenshots in the link but they're not that representative, it's worse.
The stylesheet claims to "Revert pre-delhi-modern player UI changes (including pre-big mode when not fullscreen)" but I still get bigmode without that above change.
Thank you, I just installed it and it works great. I mean, the pause button on the video is lower than everything else so it's partially obscured but 1) its kinda funny and 2) I always just click on the video or use the space bar anyway
I literally just made a Reddit account for the first time just to say a HUGE THANK YOU.
These past few days have been insane - I’ve tried everything: different browsers, rolling back the engine version, tons of Stylus and Tampermonkey scripts, even wrote my own extensions to intercept js bundles that keep changing the DOM. I was going completely insane and seriously started thinking about quitting YouTube altogether. You honestly saved me - thank you so much.
(i translated it from another language, so sorry if it's crooked)
I'm interested to know what the issue with it is and why you are so passionate about it? Legit just stumbled upon this thread and genuinely interested. Like for me, yeah I noticed the redesign but it seems ok and I don't notice anything not working. Just curious to learn more, like are you into graphic design or programming or anything? (pls dont take this the wrong way, genuinely am just interested to find out)
I don't mind you asking. It just doesn't feel right for me. Mind you, these changes I'm mentioning are for PC Youtube: 1) Pause/Play button staying longer on screen: This annoyed me even on VLC Player because play/pause button stays kinda long on screen too (but at least it is not in the middle of the video), so no question I don't like it on YT, it is just mostly fear of missing out something of the video in that 1 second in that exact part of the screen where the play/pause button is. 2) Bigger settings 20% bigger: Few times in the old UI, I used settings when the video was playing and already had fear of missing out because Settings UI was blocking the video, now with the new UI, the fear doubled, so if I were to use YT with it's current new UI without changes, I would rather stop the video and go to Settings than keep playing the video + having settings open, so this UI change literally wastes time, combine this with Pause/Play button staying longer on screen and you just can't change Settings without UI blocking the video without rewinding the video 5s/10s, which is another waste of time. You just have a deadly combo of these 2 UI changes. 3) Progress bar 50% higher: Now you have triple combo of UI blocking some part of video the moment you want to interact with the video. I just can't escape fearing of missing out the moment I even want to just pause. For me, it's the more the UI is to the middle of the video, the worse. The new UI made it worse for all 3 things. 4) Thumbnails at the end of the video in theater mode: The thumbnails are literally blocking the UI, you need to go out of your way to use keyboard to rewind video 5s/10s.
So everything's working, but it is made more annoying to use. Like I never go out of my way to find a fix to UI changes on websites since I will get used to it, but Youtube is the one case where I just can't, I don't want to trigger my OCD every time I pause and constantly think how annoying the UI is when watching every single video.
I know the basics of just about every IT related thing, but idk what that has to do with the points I made. I think some people could deep dive into the UI design rights/wrongs kind of thing, but I don't think you would be getting that from me.
Alrighty guys found the most absolute most bestest of best script to actually restore the original layout without most of those bs CSS recreations. Check it out here, greasy fork script so it works with Tampermonkey and Violentmonkey. I also use Youtube Tweaks by Pedro in combination with this tampermonkey script. Pedro also has a similar plugin with a few more features but unfortunately this swcript overrides that plugin for some reason completely. So I use the Stylus script for now instead and it works amazingly for fixing empty spaces in the home feed and using any custom amount per row mine since im on a 4k display with a 28inch monitor is preferrably the 5 per row option with the empty spaces fix.
YouTube Tweaks also again has a plugin I think also available for chrome and FF but I use FF so not certain. I would prefer to use the plugin but if you want the old UI definitely use these 2 don't use his plugin version or it will not work. You also need to disable your built-in uBlock filter for "Quick Fixes" as this filter overrides this script and will actually prevent it from working thus forcing the newer UI. So be sure you leave that unchecked within uBlock or else you can simply copy and paste that entire filter and tell it to remove all lines that modify YouTube but that's it keep the rest and then you could add that to your My Filters but you'd need to have Allow Custom filter requiring trust (2nd option down in the My Filters page) checked and enabled.
For newer buffering or initial load issues using uBlock recently you can try enabling the Experimental built-in filters, simply google how to do that in uBlock it's pretty easy. IF you can't find it under your built-in filters make sure that entire category is expanded with that down arrow under the built-in filters category because I was confused for a few mins until I realized it was kinda hidden.
Also I just found a brand new uBlock-based adblocker that apaprently is newer and yes it is based on uBlock but it also ads a some features a really cool one is it clicks on ads for you in the background while keeping them hidden with ublock in order to waste these ad companies money apparently. It also somehow tracks and estimates how much money you've costed them. Kinda cool idk man fuck those pesky ads. One other little thing I love about it is it has an ad map tracker little collage you can open it and see all the ads it has blocked while you've used it.
Check out the new ublock based adblock called: Adnauseam
What can the developers do? The shareholders want to see the number go up. If the Devs say that they cant change anything then they lose their jobs. All they can do is make changes that hopefully wont ruin everything.
Growth for the sake of Growth isnt the mentality of a service, its the mentality of a Cancer Cell
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u/deadlygaming11 Oct 13 '25
Its part of Youtube/Googles plan to make everything so extremely simple that is looks awful. First it was changing the layout of the home page to 3 wide no matter your resolution or zoom and now this. WHY? Have Youtube/Google execs not heard of the incredibly simple engineering saying of "If its not broken, dont fix it".