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Archived entry | Matt Wilcox .net

YouTube embeded player includes search bar. That's a user interface screw-up.

YouTube have started including a “brand bar” with search field in their embedded players. That’s a bad idea for two reasons; firstly embedded players are in the context of another site, and shoving a YouTube bar in the player quite easily ruins carefully crafted designs: “hey look at the video! Let me grab your attention!”. Secondly, this is an embedded player - it’s there because the author of the page including the video thinks the content of the video is relevant to their audience. Given that is the only use case for embedding a video, why would anyone want to search YouTube for a different video at that point? By all means include this new functionality, but do it after the video has played, you know, when it’s relevant. Not before.

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  1. Matt Wilcox posted 2hrs, 11min, 32sec after the entry and said:

    You can disable the bad by adding a little code into the embed mark-up. It's a welcome feature, but the point remains that the default should not be to have the bar there in the first place. It's not needed.

    http://lifehacker.com/5101887/get-rid-of-youtubes-embedded-search-bar

  2. Matt Wilcox posted 3 days, 17hrs, 31mins after the entry and said:

    YouTube have now stopped putting the search bar into the embedded players smiley icon: smile

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