User:Diyamund/sandbox/History of YouTube website design
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YouTube is a video sharing website, founded by Jawed Karim, Steven Chen, and Chad Hurley in 2005. Over the years, many changes have been made to the website's layout and design.
"Dating site" (early 2005)[edit]
In early 2005, YouTube asked what gender and age you were. Not many archives of this design exist, and the ones that do have incorrect assets from 2006.
Master (late 2005 - late 2011)[edit]
Being the second longest lived design at 6 years, this is undoubtedly the design that has had the most changes over the years. The name Master comes from spritesheets, most likely also being the name of the branch the code was on.
Refresh (late 2011 - late 2012)[edit]
Being the shortest lived design, this design was more commonly known as Cosmic Panda. It moved away from the basic design of Master and had colors that were softer on the eyes, as well as popping out more.'
Epic Panda (scrapped)[edit]
Being the only design that was completely scrapped, Epic Panda was the in-between of Refresh and Hitchhiker. There are not very many archives of it.
Hitchhiker (late 2012 - late 2021)[edit]
Being the longest lived design, lasting a whole 9 years, Hitchhiker ditched the gradients of Refresh, instead opting for a more flat design with the content being aligned to the left. It also completely changed the layout of almost every page, with the homepage, the Watch page, and the Channel page all being completely overhauled.
Watch 7.0[edit]
Along with Hitchhiker came a new Watch page layout. The video title and user info were now below the video player, whereas before they were above the player. In early betas, custom user link images were still in-tact, although in the final rollout of Watch 7.0, these were removed in favor of showing the user's display name and profile picture.
Nirvana update (Feb 2014)[edit]
This update codenamed after the '90s grunge band updated the design of the site, now being center-aligned again with boxes called "cards" that contained content. The background of the page and page frame were also swapped, with the page background being grey and the page frame's background being white. The earliest known beta of Nirvana is from December of 2013.
Watch 8.0 update (August 2014)[edit]
In August of 2014, the info of the Watch page had its layout changed. The tabs in the bottom right were changed to action buttons on the left, that now invoked panels and menus instead of switching the view. This meant that the video's description and upload date were always visible now. Along with that, the like and dislike counts were merged with the buttons, being on the bottom right of the primary information card, just like the counts were previously. This update also adopted the Nirvana design, separating the different cards from each other. Interestingly, many of the CSS class names are unchanged from Watch 7.0, with only the action buttons having new class names.
Kevlar (mid 2017 - present)[edit]
More commonly known as Polymer because of the JavaScript library it is based on, Kevlar is the current YouTube design, being codenamed after a strong form of polymer. It fully incorporated Material Design into the design fully, finishing what Hitchhiker had started.
Criticism[edit]
When it first released, Kevlar was criticized for being slow, especially on Mozilla Firefox. This is due to the way Polymer renders JSON data received from the server completely client-side with JavaScript rather than the HTML being received directly from the server. Over the years, these complaints have mostly dwindled away, although they still exist in small circles dedicated to old YouTube.