HACKER Q&A
📣 anonytrary

YouTube website UI super buggy for anyone else?


I've noticed over the past few months that YouTube's web UI has been incredibly slow and buggy to the point where I just want to stop watching videos.

Going into full-screen mode sometimes takes 30 seconds; it'll keep playing but show a black non-full screen and an empty UI. It randomly skips to other videos when I try to pause the current video. I could make countless other little nitpicks. The search bar's text isn't vertically aligned when searching for people's videos on their channel, etc.

It feels like they introduced a bunch of blocking code in the event loop and the UI is just slower than a turtle now. This happened recently, too. YouTube has otherwise been fine on this computer for a really long time.


  👤 Nextgrid Accepted Answer ✓
It's absolutely terrible in Safari.

They switched to JS page transitions instead of a full page reload, but it's actually slower. I end up always hitting refresh right after clicking on a video and the URL bar updates and a full refresh is still faster than their JS-based one.

The entire page just feels heavy, and I'm afraid of clicking anywhere as to not disturb the page and cause a reload.

Fortunately there's a third-party web frontend for YouTube that doesn't have these problems: https://invidio.us


👤 luminadiffusion
Might also want to run it in Firefox Developer Edition and profile the page load, and JavaScript. You should be able to tell pretty quickly what component is causing the UI bugginess.

👤 sarcasmatwork
Try a different browser? Empty browser cache? Try private mode in browser? Virus scanner or browser plugin could be impacting.