30
votes
The new YouTube layout is just too horrible, is there a way to revert back?
The new layout which shows just two videos per row seems to be designed for the two pence cranial capacity of the folks who are typically addicted to short videos. Is there a way to revert back to the earlier layout?
I don't know about mobile but for desktop, I just switched to https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube and it's been a much better experience. Read about its features and see if it meets your needs.
Other than that, there's a landscape of userstyles and browser addons, each with their issues, breakages, and risks as they play cat and mouse with the YouTube UI team.
I switched recently and I really like it. Clean, no ads, easy to hide disliked recommendations or even hide all of them altogether, hide all comments by default.
The only thing missing is that content creators I follow don't get the views and will miss out on income. So stepping up on Patreon or direct payment methods is a good alternative
Many of the youtubers I watch are very vocal that youtube ad revenue is a joke and they themselves use adblock. It makes it an easier decision to use adblock and just support them on twitch/patreon when Google already doesn't pay them.
Using Freetube myself, it's honestly worse than the browser (with the correct extensions) - if I hadn't specifically been looking for a non-browser app, I wouldn't recommend it.
Like, the keyboard shortcuts are inconsistent - sometimes spacebar is pause, other times spacebar is 'toggle fullscreen', it's pretty clear there are two separate pieces of code and it depends what currently has focus.
The Sponsorblock and title renaming plugin are both halfassed versions of the real browser-plugin - they're integrated in that they include the display, but the title can't be toggled like the browser plugin can (with the dot on the right side of the title, to view the original title) and and it doesn't give you an option to submit new skip times or title.
The windowing is downright obnoxious - if you try to open a new window by running the binary again (e.g. hitting the windows key and typing "freetube" then enter), it just switches focus to the existing freetube window. The only way to open a new window is with a special "new window" button in the app itself.
There are obviously cat-and-mouse problems that get a free pass (and thus that I haven't mentioned), but Freetube suffers from just plain poor design. The best I can say about it is that it works, that it uses somewhat less RAM than the browser website, and that it's not a literal browser tab which means youtube crashing can't possibly take down the 700 browser tabs I've somehow accumulated.
It lets you keep a local list of subscriptions, but sadly fails to take advantage of that by diversifying outside of just Youtube - ideally it would also include subscriptions to channels on Nebula/Floatplane/etc, so that it's easy to slowly transition off youtube or just to perpetually fence-sit.
I'm not trying to make you use Freetube, but, in its defense:
For me, watching YT ad-free is so huge. Having slightly reduced tracking is nice, too.
(People want to [contribute and] change titles?)
You can do that in the browser, too. I don't know which extension does it, but it's probably Ublock Origin.
Do you have "use DeArrow video titles" enabled? It's great, take this video: the official title is "the worst monitor ever... in color!", but someone submitted the title "Dasung Paperlike Color E-Ink Monitor Review", which is what it shows up as in Firefox and Freetube-with-DeArrow-enabled, which is more accurate and less clickbaity. It's not the best example, but you get the idea. Sometimes I genuinely want to see the no-information clickbaity title, but 1) that's what the title toggle is for (when I have one), and 2) I almost always prefer when the title actually describes the video, in practice.
Useful to know. Not useful when I'm in a different Activity, let alone giving the Freetube window focus (so I still have to switch Activities, open the new window, then drag the new window back to the original activity), but at least there's a keyboard shortcut.
I have the same issue with the space bar, FWIW. It happens if I click the button to enable fullscreen mode after the video is already playing. That click puts the focus on the fullscreen button. Since FreeTube is (I believe) an Electron app, standard browser focus + keyboard navigation rules apply, meaning the space bar activates whatever control has current focus. This happens for me on Mac and I presume based on @PuddleOfKittens mention of the Windows key that the problem is a cross-platform one.
On Mac at least, FreeTube integrates with the system’s Now Playing API, which means I can use the dedicated play/pause keyboard key to do what I want the space bar to do.
I use Linux. I have a rant about how "Super" is a pointless neologism for the sake of avoiding Microsoft's terminology, if you want it.
Ah I see. I guess the reason I never hit this is because I use keyboard shortcuts (f for fullscreen, t for theatre mode).
Sometimes
fdoesn't fullscreen, but spacebar does. That's what's so frustrating - I don't have keys that consistently do the thing.Indeed is truly terrible...
On reddit I saw this solution with ublock origin. At the moment it works, but I think it won't work forever sadly.
www.youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.EXPERIMENT_FLAGS.kevlar_watch_grid, false)For me, the only issue is items per grid row. For now, the below ublock fix from this reddit thread seems to be working (this one is for 4 per rows, but you can edit as you like):
But this is only a temporary fix. There is no guarantee this will keep working once you're upgraded to manifest v3, there is also no guarantee youtube will some day not manage to override this.
Oh sweet, sweet userscripts. How I love thee.
Thanks for the link.
Thanks for the extra userscripts!
They've also done something that messes up uBlock where videos won't play and give a cryptic error message.
I use the YouTube Redux extension to make it look like the mid-2010's
I'll have to give that a try. I recently started using Enhancer for Youtube (Firefox / Chrome) after Google started pushing this horrendously oversized mobile-focused design on desktop users.
Want to add yewtu.be as a possible alternative front-end for youtube. Doesn't work too well with uploads from music distribution sites.