The YouTube Cosmic Panda Design Is Dead

The Cosmic Panda is dead. YouTube's sleek redesign from last summer, which was launched as an opt-in experiment, has been terminated now that YouTube has embraced its new design, partially inspired by Cosmic Panda.

While Cosmic Panda completely altered YouTube and provided a new look for most of the pages, the player view, channels and so on, it was just an experiment, Google says, one that has now ended since the team has learned everything it needed.

"Yesterday marked the last day of the channels and watch experiment, otherwise known as Cosmic Panda," YouTube informed in a help page.

"Contrary to what some might have thought, Cosmic Panda was not the new version of YouTube to come, but just an experiment we used to test out some new and interesting ideas," it said.

But now that the new YouTube is live for everyone, there's nothing more to learn, so the experiment is shutting down, unfortunately for those that prefer it to both the old and the new YouTube, which is pretty much anyone that ever used it.

"Since launching the experiment in July, we learned a lot and incorporated many results of the experiment into our recent homepage and channels update, which you’re using now. We're happy with what we found and are now bringing Cosmic Panda to a close," YouTube explained.

The new YouTube borrows quite a lot from the Cosmic Panda experiment. The color scheme is very similar, if not identical. Many of the links have been replaced by buttons, like in Cosmic Panda.

But it doesn't borrow enough for many Cosmic Panda users. The design itself is more boring and less elegant. There are also some usability regressions, like the fact that Cosmic Panda remembered the player size between sessions and defaulted to the last one you used.

The biggest complaint though is that it is no longer possible to view 720p videos inside the YouTube page at their full-resolution, meaning with no scaling.