How to Disable New YouTube Layout (Polymer 2019)
Google has rolled out a new design for their YouTube video service. The updated look, known as 'Polymer', features a number of improvements, such as larger thumbnails, faster playlist access, now button icons, and more. If you are not a fun of this restyled look of YouTube, it is possible to go back to the previous look easily.
The key changes of the new Polymer style of YouTbue include:
- High-resolution video preview thumbnails
- A new "Add to queue" feature to quickly create a video playlist. You could see it before in YouTube Android app.
- The ability to exclude a particular channel content from recommendations you see on YouTube.
- Restyled buttons.
- New colors and larger titles.
New design:
Previous design:
If you do not like the change happened to the YouTube design, you will be happy to know that Google provides a special parameter which can be added to the URL. It makes it easy to switch between the classic and modern visual style of the service.
To Disable New YouTube Layout (Polymer 2019),
- Open a browser of your choice, e.g. Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc.
- Visit YouTube using its regular URL
https://www.youtube.com/ - Now, add the
?disable_polymer=trueportion to the URL address to gethttps://www.youtube.com/?disable_polymer=true. - Voila, you have the classic YouTube design!
Setting the disable_polymer parameter to false will restore the new design. I.e. you should use the following URL: https://www.youtube.com/?disable_polymer=false.
You are done!
If you are not happy with changing the URL every time you need to switch between the new old YouTube styles, you may want to install a browser extension that will do the trick for you.
Extensions are available for Chromium-based browsers, and for Mozilla Firefox.
Browser Extensions
Using these extensions, you will get the YouTube home page always set to the classic design.
Note that the tricks mentioned in this post are available until Google keeps the classic design option. Sooner or later they will remove it, so it will not be so easy to change the appearance of YouTube.
Support us
Winaero greatly relies on your support. You can help the site keep bringing you interesting and useful content and software by using these options:
Thank you so much, youtube is usable again now!
You are most welcome!
Uhh for me its the opposite. I have it set to dark mode because its easier on my eyes, I’ve only had problems for the past couple of weeks. When I click on a new video it sets if from my preferred setting 480p, to 1080p and I have to set it back to 480p each time. And yesterday my youtube layout was fine. But now the the homepage is the only thing that’s bothering me. I go to home page and now its flooded with big thumbnails and I can’t exclude anything. Like I’d watch a few videos from lets say Markiplier and before it would pop up on the home page usually lower below my music mixes. I used to be able to press an X to remove them but now I can’t do that. And before where I could press an arrow on the right of my music playlists now I have to press a tab under the 4 playlist videos it shows. I’m not sure but I’ve only been having issues since I got a cellphone to access youtube with the same account. Will using this disable polymer thing fix it or will it remove my darkmode. Because darkmode has been out for a while but this homepage layout issue has only been a problem for a few days.. Like does it remove everything or just a few specific annoyances?
If you don’t want the ‘New’ YouTube layout anywhere on YouTube, right click on a YT page, click Inspect, go to Application Tab, under Storage expand Cookies/youtube, clear the PREF Value then paste: al=en&f5=30030&f6=8
Refresh the page.
Do Not clear cookies!
If you want the new layout back, clear the cookies.
Thanks a lot!
but then i lose DARK MODE
This tip works even though the disable_polymer hint now doesn’t work.
All right but then the dark mode is not available anymore !
True!
Get ‘Dark Reader’ add-on.
Great tool!
Please update your post with this extension for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-classic-restore-y/aooobjmnokciopfgejdlbnklafighoaj
It’s smaller than the one you linked. If you do update it, it would also be great to include that the new Polymer YouTube website is MUCH slower than the old one. :) You could even add more links to extensions for dark themes for the old one
Uhh for me its the opposite. I have it set to dark mode because its easier on my eyes, I’ve only had problems for the past couple of weeks. When I click on a new video it sets if from my preferred setting 480p, to 1080p and I have to set it back to 480p each time. And yesterday my youtube layout was fine. But now the the homepage is the only thing that’s bothering me. I go to home page and now its flooded with big thumbnails and I can’t exclude anything. Like I’d watch a few videos from lets say Markiplier and before it would pop up on the home page usually lower below my music mixes. I used to be able to press an X to remove them but now I can’t do that. And before where I could press an arrow on the right of my music playlists now I have to press a tab under the 4 playlist videos it shows. I’m not sure but I’ve only been having issues since I got a cellphone to access youtube with the same account. Will using this disable polymer thing fix it or will it remove my darkmode. Because darkmode has been out for a while but this homepage layout issue has only been a problem for a few days.. Like does it remove everything or just a few specific annoyances?
But thats only for the homepage look, when i click on any video to play, it goes back to playing in new bs layout again
Doesn’t work anymore. Youtube disabled it.
It still works, just only in some sections. some of the core functions in YouTube have duality of w/ and w/o polymer, and YouTube uses that switch itself,
mostly playlist management and studio links for advance management which are the same links as the “pretty” easy management tools just with the polymer disabling link, apparently keeping the set of tools from the “old” website alive and linking to it, is simpler than building some of the content management tools again.
so don’t worry.
you can try the subscription section with the switch and it will work fine, disabling polymer and some of the banners too.
the cookie does nothing though, at least for the presentation. the ‘f6=8’ is being used in a lot of places. even youtube-dl (the python/exe tool to download youtube videos) just updated some of the requests to use it (June 2020!). meh.
The the web-extensions described below in my github page, project “chrome_extensions”, release section. I’m not going to put links since I don’t want to self-promote, just help.
anyway, I a free web-extension (a browser plugin) that works on all Chrome/Firefox based browsers,
named ‘SPF-Killer’,
which (very gently) makes YouTube use old style loading and navigation, among other things it also sets that cookie value (when needed) and automatically uses the disable polymer switch (it redirects the page when needed).
as for the dark-theme, you can try a generic dard-theme for all websites that invert the (usually) bright color theme, so all of the websites you use are dark-themed. Its called ‘Invert’ (and its pure CSS web-extension, no javascript).
Another web-extension is called ‘boostaler’ (boost by stale) I’ve specifically developed it to speed up YouTube, by making the browser use the cache better (the browser also updates the cache in the background). I found out later it works pretty well for all websites.
Another web-extension I developed to speed up youtube (and then made it to work on all of the websites),
is called UnLazy. It speeds up image loading.
There are probably other web-extensions that might be useful to you, feel free to browse around ‘chrome_extensions’ project, release section, in my github repository.