YouTube Updates Seek Bar to Prevent Accidental Scrubs

There are a lot of things about YouTube that can often end up being rather frustrating, and one thing in particular that people seem to have a problem with has to do with the seek bar. This is the bar that you can use to tell where you are in the overall length of the video, and when YouTube updated it to make it so that it would become the entire width of your screen once you started to watch a video in full screen mode a lot of users ended up reporting a very frustrating phenomenon.

The seek bar was now right under the full screen button, which meant that a user trying to make it so that they can view their video of choice in full screen mode would probably accidentally tap on the end of the seek bar instead which would lead to the video getting scrubbed to the very end. If you combine this with YouTube’s rather annoying autoplay feature, you would often find yourself tapping to the end of the video which would activate autoplay and suddenly take you to a random recommended video that would have nothing to do with what you had initially been trying to watch.

As a result of the fact that this is the case, YouTube is changing the way the seek bar works. Now you would no longer be able to tap to scrub, and instead you might have to scroll your finger along the seek bar or perhaps use the double tap feature to get to where you want to go. This is an important step towards optimizing YouTube for mobile use since touch screens can be a little finicky to operate, and while it’s quite remarkable that YouTube had not made this change previously most users would be relieved to have gotten it at all.

This problem was actually the result of a previous update YouTube had tried to implement to improve the user experience but at the end of the day there is a limit to how effective things that sound good in theory would end up being in practice.

H/T: AP.

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