YouTube Testing Material Design For Its Web Version

Material Design is a design language that Google brought onto Android a couple of years ago, and while we have seen the company toy with different design languages over the years, Material Design seems to have stuck around. In fact more of Google’s services and apps have started to adopt the design on the web and on mobile.

We’ve seen the YouTube app for mobile get a Material Design makeover, and now it looks like the web version could be getting a similar makeover soon. Note that YouTube is only testing the design and you will need to enable it for yourself if you want to experience it. This seems to suggest that maybe it isn’t ready for primetime yet, and that there’s also no guarantee that this could be the finished product.

There are also some caveats if you’re looking to try it out. For starters it seems that you will need to be using Chrome, although given that Chrome is now the most popular internet browser we reckon that shouldn’t be a problem for at least half of you guys. Secondly it also seems that your region needs to be set in the US for it to work.

For the most part as you can see in the screenshot above (courtesy of Android Police), it seems that the changes are subtle. The main differences appear to be how the buttons look, the choice of colors, and the text boxes, all of which feel “flatter” and more muted. No word on when YouTube will roll out this redesign in earnest, but we like what we see. In the meantime you can follow the instructions below (thanks to Redditor giorgiomarinel) to get your YouTube the Material Design makeover.

1) go to https:www.youtube.com/?gl=US

2) open the developer tools (ctrl + shift + i)

3) go to the `Resources´ tab and delete the VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE cookie for the youtube domain

4) go to the console and define the VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE cookie using the following command:

document.cookie=”VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=Qa1hUZu3gtk;path=/;domain=.youtube.com”;

5) reload the page

You can also reuse your VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE cookie.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Web
Tags: YouTube