Restore classic Youtube?

[mickandlee]

Until today I was using classic Youtube via this method - https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74j8r6/how_to_set_old_youtube_layout_permanently_in/

But since my PC rebooted (and Win 10 probably updated itself again), it seems to no longer work? Could anyone help me get classic back? The new interface is unbearably slow for me.

[Pentium4User]

Google will shut down that old interface soon, they're processing that right now.
See: viewtopic.php?f=66&t=23762&e=1&view=unread#unread
You can Try https://www.youtube.com./?disable_polymer=1
in combination with the User Agent of an older FF version (e.g. 42)

[mickandlee]

Ugh that's so annoying to hear. Are there any other options at all that are more peasant computer friendly?

Sadly that trick doesn't seem to work for me.

[Pentium4User]

I don't know any and I think YouTube will also make them unusable in future.
You can read viewtopic.php?f=66&t=23762&e=1&view=unread#unread, there is something written with Greasemonkey, but I don't know if that still works.

My crystal ball says that this is not persistent.

[Moonchild]

They already extended availability way past the original stated migration date. I'm surprised it's still being persisted.
No, It will all go away. Material will be gone. Any tricks to still get it back will cease to function when they finally remove it everywhere.

[mickandlee]

Darn it. Well, thanks for taking the time to tell me. Saved me potentially hours of pointless searching.

R.I.P, dear classic Youtube.

[Lurker_01]

with ?disable_polymer=1 the videos show the old layout but the main page already shows the new one, the latest workaround that still works is to use an user agent override and ""spoof"" yourself as google bot, youtube still serves old layout with that user-agent.

[wickedsp1d3r]

Using the new YouTube with Pale Moon make my fans go wild. The page is sluggish as heck.

I have used an extension to bring back the old layout with faked User-Agent, but it seems like this way is going be useless soon. The new layout comes nevertheless.

[letmeindude]

and ""spoof"" yourself as google bot, youtube still serves old layout with that user-agent.

Which one? I'm using this one and it doesn't work:

Code: Select all

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

EDIT: It works with a clean profile.
EDIT: Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

[Pentium4User]

Please use the Firefox compatible User Agent as default.
Then use the site-specific User Agent general.useragent.override.youtube.com to set a special one for YouTube.
Just set the Firefox version to 42, that worked for me some days ago, but doesn't anymore. It sometimes works, but as I said, they will completely abandon the Material (old) theme of YouTube.

They also seem to abandon support for Internet Explorer 11, that also doesn't seem to use the new Polymer design yet.

[Moonchild]

They also seem to abandon support for Internet Explorer 11, that also doesn't seem to use the new Polymer design yet.

IE 11 can't use Polymer, period. It simply doesn't have the feature set available to use this Blink-specific framework.

[Lurker_01]

EDIT: Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Probably that is just youtube flakiness if you just use user agent (happened before with the old firefox user agent), i also use ?disable_polymer=1 so i always get the old design.

[Pentium4User]

They also seem to abandon support for Internet Explorer 11, that also doesn't seem to use the new Polymer design yet.

IE 11 can't use Polymer, period. It simply doesn't have the feature set available to use this Blink-specific framework.

That means it is real that IE users can't access YouTube anymore after the Material design is completely abandoned.
This is really bad because a lot of businesses still use IE11 on Win 7 (ESU) or even on Windows 10 because they don't like the Edge App and therefore all apps are disabled for security reasons.


Also the URL parameter doesn't work anymore for me (Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel endpoint Frankfurt).
Sometimes it does, but not everytime and mostly not.

[VADemon]

I had overlooked this comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/commen ... w/fv6q1x8/
TLDR: You need a "Google Bot" user agent to still get the old style. Very likely that other crawling bots' UAs will work too (think of Yahoo, Bing, Yandex etc.)

[Ziko577]

I had overlooked this comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/commen ... w/fv6q1x8/
TLDR: You need a "Google Bot" user agent to still get the old style. Very likely that other crawling bots' UAs will work too (think of Yahoo, Bing, Yandex etc.)

How would that work with Pale Moon though? I tried it with Eclipsed Moon but gave up as I couldn't figure out how to make it work.

[Alister]

I had overlooked this comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/commen ... w/fv6q1x8/
TLDR: You need a "Google Bot" user agent to still get the old style. Very likely that other crawling bots' UAs will work too (think of Yahoo, Bing, Yandex etc.)

Yes, it works!

To everyone, how to do it.

• type about:config in adress line and press Enter.
• search line: general.useragent.override.youtube.com and double click on it. (if there is no such line, then create it)
• in popup window paste this line and press Enter:

Code: Select all

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +[http://www.google.com/bot.html](http://www.google.com/bot.html))

Done.

[VADemon]

I tried it with Eclipsed Moon but gave up as I couldn't figure out how to make it work.

I don't use Pale Moon here, but I tested things with this Firefox addon and it turns out, you can get the old YT design if you only have "Googlebot" in your UA as a text string, any variations of that (e.g. "bot" or "ooglebot") don't work. "YandexBot" as a string works too so my theory was correct.

You can check your own user agent if you search on DuckDuckGo for "user agent", the search engine itself will show.

Google UA docs: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943
Yandex UA docs: https://yandex.com/support/webmaster/ro ... obots.html

What makes me doubt/cautious is that they use a whitelist of UAs for the "old design" switch. Simply passing "bot" doesn't work...

[VADemon]

DO NOT SET A "GOOGLEBOT" USER AGENT GLOBALLY!!!

Only override it for Youtube, if possible. Cloudflare are !@#$ and will block you if you visit a website they proxy using a Googlebot UA. The page will tell that they detected an attack from your network (absolutely misleading). Example website to test on: nginx.com

[Psycho-A]

The script that fixes Show/Hide buttons on video descriptions:
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/40522 ... escription

[BKelley56]

I found that out, the hard way, but now it appears that Googlebot User Agent doesn't even work on Youtube anymore. I have it loaded, Youtube is specified, but I now get the new YouTube display, not what I was getting previously with Googlebot user agent loaded.

Anyone know if even Googlebot has been disabled by YouTube somehow?