YouTube’s redesign is official, and there’s a dark mode

They increased the size of some of the touch targets, which is probably the right call on a small mobile touchscreen, but needs to be carefully balanced with content density, as the negative spaces have been increasing over time and there's less and less content above the fold.

Of course, these screenshots are taken on a desktop with a respectable resolution, where the appeal of these changes for the viewer is less pronounced: there's some futzing around with the spacing, the default text size has slightly increased to no real benefit. There's more negative space on the desktop too, but the larger screen size offsets some of the losses. Dark mode is nice.

Overall, it feels like a bit of a wash, but, if they're gaining both a conforming design and a redone UI architecture, I can understand. I don't think it's a meaningful-enough improvement, but it's not an egregiously bad design either. In a few months, no one will remember what's different.

I won't switch to the new layout until extensions like https://github.com/ParticleCore/Particle https://github.com/YePpHa/YouTubeCenter/ are fully supported.

After you try features like fullbrowser mode, disabled autoplay, PIP mode when you scroll down to read comments, animated thumbnail preview on hover, detailed information below the thumbnail like resolution/like ratio and many more it's impossible to go back.

Seems to load a bit faster, and is more responsive in general. I kinda like it, especially the new dark mode.