Home > Tips and Tricks

Bring Back Watch Later button on YouTube Homepage Video Thumbnails

In this guide, we will show you the steps to bring back the Watch Later button on the YouTube homepage video thumbnails. The Silicon Valley giants keep on testing new features across their various products. While that’s well and good, what isn’t is the fact that it implements it without even taking the consent from the users. And in some instances, you don’t even have the option to disable that feature (countless features of Chrome). So your only course of action is to accept those changes or switch to any other product.

Considering the fact that we are already deeply engrossed in the Google ecosystem, it’s never an easy option to ditch the Search Engine giant offerings. In this regard, its video streaming service YouTube was recently in the news for disabling the like counts across all the videos. While you could literally count the number of users on your fingers who actually wanted this feature, that’s not the cause of concern for Google and they still implemented this feature.

Watch Later button on YouTube Homepage Video Thumbnails
Credits: Reddit

Though it received quite a few negative reactions and backlash, it ultimately lead to nothing and users had no choice but to accept this change. And as of now, there has been another UI tweak in YouTube- this time around, at the cost of user experience. Up until this point, if you wanted to add any video to your watch later playlist, then you just had to hover the mouse over that video’s thumbnail and click on the clock icon situated at the top right.

Watch Later button on YouTube Homepage Video Thumbnails
Old UI. Credits: Cricket Australia YouTube Channel

But now, this option has been revamped and you will have to click on the Watch Later button but only after you have watched the video thumbnail for around 3-4 seconds. And this is what completely destroys the workflow. Earlier, as soon as you come across a video, you could easily click on the clock icon right at that instance to add it to Watch List and then continue scrolling down your feed. But now, there is an additional 3-4 seconds delay before that option actually appears.

Watch Later button on YouTube Homepage Video Thumbnails
New UI. Credits: Cricket Australia YouTube Channel

First off, you will be greeted with the “Keep hovering to play” message and once that disappears, then only you will be able to interact with the rest of the menu. While this is definitely quite an infuriating UI change, to say the least, but Google has atleast given us an option to bring back the old UI (for a change). So without further ado, let’s check out the steps to bring back the Watch Later button on the YouTube homepage video thumbnails.

Bring Back Watch Later button on YouTube Homepage Video Thumbnails

Watch Later button on YouTube Homepage Video Thumbnails

  1. To begin with, head over to the YouTube website.
  2. Then click on your profile situated at the top right
  3. After that, select Settings from the drop-down menu.
    Watch Later button on YouTube Homepage Video Thumbnails
  4. Now select Playback and Performance from the left menu bar.
  5. Finally, disable the toggle next to Inline Playback.

That’s it. Now refresh YouTube and it should bring back the Watch Later button on the homepage video thumbnails. On that note, we round off this guide. It’s actually glad to see that we have been given adoption to control this feature as per our requirement.

But don’t be surprised if this toggle is removed in the subsequent updates. Anyways, what are your views on this change? Was this change uncalled for or is it something that wouldn’t bother you much? Do let us know in the comments section below.


Share: