The only issues I have these days with YouTube stutters/buffering is because of my lame ass ISP/network setup.
Actually it kinda makes sense. These data mining companies like Google, Facebook etc make their site so unbearable in a browser that it encourages people to use the app, which can data mine even more because it can access your camera, mic, contacts etc. Though I presume they can still do that through the browser because browsers today just let websites do anything to the system.
(As usual for you) That makes no fucking sense as the apps are consistently even worse so anyone mad about the website layout is not going to be happy about the app (not to mention they'll be bitching about using a device with smaller display/having to do touch input, etc). Plus, I don't know, you'd have to be a total dumbshit to go "I hate them making everything like apps, I'll show them, I'll just use the app!"
for those wondering, this is what Old/New looks like. Everything is larger in the new layout, more spaced out. I tried it for a while, didnt like it.
the ONLY thing the new version does well is that it got rid of the stupid window size video constraints so now the video will maximize to the browser window and not be locked to some arbitrary sizes
It also enabled the dark theme. Not sure how you had that working on the old style, was it some add-on? Because they definitely were not allowing that for me until the new layout.
This isn't a big change at all, don't think its better or worse (other than dark theme enabling). Bet it works a lot better on touch devices though, while minimizing, if not outright not adding issues for desktop users. That's actually fairly impressive accomplishment I think. There's tons of other things I wish they'd work on though, so I'm not going to say YouTube is perfect either.
Pretty much all the time here, it's slow as hell since the changes. Too much javascript BS. It's always been kind of slow but it's even worse now. On one particular computer I also can't follow a link to youtube, if I do, it resets everything like video size etc and I spend the next 5 minutes resetting it all because it's so slow and clunky. By the time I have the video set to normal mode and auto play set to off the video is done playing. I also get this annoying blue language bar on top and other annoyances that fill the screen. I just want to watch a freaken short video from a Reddit post or w/e source that is linking to it and they keep shoving all this crap around it.
Not sure what script junk you're getting. For Youtube, I just allow like 3 total scripts (all related to Google) and things work great. I also use uBlock though. Which, Youtube somehow had managed to get uBlock to stop working for a bit (it full on got changed to being not enabled on Youtube pages which definitely was not something I did, so I just enabled it and it started working again; it might not actually have been Youtube itself though as uBlock stopped working on mobile Firefox after an update, and had to manually install uBlock again through the link on the uBlock Add-on page so it might've been a Firefox/uBlock issue).
Even on Chrome where I have hardly any add-ons I don't get a bunch of junk on Youtube.
But then I also don't watch videos from jackasses that throw tons of scripts and shit up on their videos.
I do fucking hate people that embed/link Youtube fullscreen as it often wouldn't let you just push it back to normal.
The change isn't for the patrons, but for Google data mining and tracking. They deny patrons to go back to the less tablet-ish style unless you allow them to track and data mine you. Otherwise you get the new look, which is for near-blind people on tablets.
And I do have several Gmail accounts, but I do not use them anymore because I do not trust Google. Ever since Google decided to restructure itself (e.g. Alphabet) their decision to annoy people into giving up privacy has gotten much 'in your face' worse.
The changes in the past couple of years have been of no benefit to the patron. Only cowsumers would think as such.
I'm not a fan of Google, but you're an idiot if you didn't realize that's always how Google was operating. Before they were just plain not being transparent about it. Now they're open about it and you actually have some control over that. There's actually privacy settings in your Google Account that you can adjust. Plus, if you're that concerned, use Firefox (or one of the offshoots) and lockdown the privacy/tracking features, use add-ons to further limit tracking, and use a throwaway Google account that you don't have tied to anything else.
What change? To pushing 2 factor verification? That's a legit security thing.
Oh boo fucking hoo, a free site doesn't let you customize it unless you create an account. The whole web works like that unless you realize there's other tools you can use that will achieve all of what you want (less tracking and changing annoyances on websites).
You should look into add-ons that will change the look of Youtube. Pretty sure there's even ones for Chrome, and on Firefox you can massively change appearance of a site. You can do that with just adblockers even ("block an ad on this page" lets you block not just ads, I use it to remove those fucking awful big promotional previews that Netflix started doing).
Bullshit. Android is massively improved in the last couple of years, YouTube has improved although I agree it could stand to be improved in lots of ways (they really need to add in more ability to deal with subscriptions). GMail seems about the same as ever (they actually just recently stopped mining your e-mails for ad words too). Google's tools like Docs have improved (legitimately could be used instead of MS Office for average users now).
Some of you people bitch about this stuff but its clear you don't actually give a shit since there's lots of things you can do about it. Quick Google search will bring up tons of them. Seems to just be more of the weird way that people just bitch incessantly about tech because they're too ignorant to bother seeing if there might be solutions. I swear some of the people on this site are technophobes if not straight up luddites. But I guess its human nature, to be given mountains of information readily at your disposal that you could expand your knowledge and fairly easily fix problems, but instead we'll just ignore it so we can bitch and moan and prop up our ignorance and then complain about how shit everything is while we do nothing to fix it.