YouTube has seen many variations of its upcoming UI refresh, and they only roll-out to a small subset of lucky users. This recent change makes it more polished than ever.

After loading up the code needed to sneak-a-peak at the recent changes (Here’s how), the first thing you’ll notice is that the UI has been further refined, with more emphasis on featured videos.

A recent YouTube layout
This layout squeezes in more video content into the stream, whilst keeping a minimalist look

Compared to the last time I reported about the major changes to the UI, there is now a small list of video categories to the upper-left of the site, as well as featured videos which have larger thumbnails, and some other minor changes.

This is not what I wanted to talk about today though, take a look at this:

New-Look YouTube Player

There isn’t much in the way of new features, but this newer, flat and slick YouTube player makes the current one look, well old.

An updated version of the YouTube player
Slick!

Here’s the familiar old one, for your convenience:

The current YouTube player
Wave goodbye to the bland-looking YouTube player!

Still in testing..

These designs are tests, and just that.. Who knows when Google will roll-out these changes to everyone? But lets hope it is sooner rather than later…

What do you think of the new-look YouTube player? Let us know in the comments!

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