Youtube’s New Design Launched for Testing, Dubbed as “Cosmic Panda”

It has been quite a long while since Youtube totally simplified its interface a few years ago. Today, Google’s redesigning their popular video streaming website again, under the codename, “Cosmic Panda”.

The new interface overhauls the original simplified version of the website. True, although it is also quite simple this time, the website is a lot more interactive. Among the most noticeable changes would be the larger images for video links, the simple video size adjustment buttons, and the relatively “smooth” navigation when browsing for related videos.

Upon looking at the interface of one video, the very first thing that would probably enter your mind would be Google+. Well, because the video player area is mostly black that might not be the case, but take a look at the arrangement of the player’s functions, and how the functions move themselves, it’s all screaming Google+.

Youtube’s Cosmic Panda now allows you to watch videos all the while navigating through the entire website, but you apparently need to be using Google Chrome to activate this feature. Firefox and IE users need not worry about that though, because we’re sure that your experience navigating through Youtube’s Cosmic Panda would still be quite enjoyable.

Personally, the new interface of their Cosmic Panda project is quite refreshing. The elements within the page smoothly sliding around add bonus points in its aesthetic design. The functionality of the pages is also very nice. Although it feels quite new to navigate around, you still get that feeling that information and data within each page are placed exactly where they should be.

One of the less noticeable features of Cosmic Panda is that they finally returned the avatar images to its proper place. During Youtube’s last site revamp, it was a bit unfortunate that they practically removed the uploader’s avatar image in the videos, along with the avatar images of each user commenting on the video.

To activate Cosmic Panda you simply need to access Youtube’s Cosmic Panda page. Just in case you don’t want this new interface, you also use the same link to revert it back to the original one.