The feature is not groundbreaking but it is definitely a welcome addition for Youtube lovers who spend hours everyday watching one video after the other.
Compared to the desktop version of the site, the Android and iOS versions of Youtube had come a long way since launch. Smartphones have evolved a lot that pushed the developers to give maximum attention to those platforms. They continued to make it look better, be more intuitive and easy to use. The Android version gets the best things much earlier compared to iOS because of the sheer number of users onboard and the frequent changes Google make to the operating system.
In the recent past, the developers of Youtube app changed the position of the menu bar and brought it to the bottom of the screen so that they are easier to access. Almost all top smartphones have screen sizes bigger than 5 or 5.5-inch that they had to bring it to the bottom. Users can just move their finger around and will easily find the subscriptions, account and other features within a second than having to hold their phone in both hands.
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After working enough on mobile platforms, the developer team had launched the video preview feature on Youtube desktop version. When you hover your mouse button over any of the video thumbnails on the website, it will preview the video for just 3 seconds before it goes back to the original thumbnail picture. As of now, it has been confirmed that the feature works only on Google’s own Chrome browser and Opera.
If you are a huge fan of Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft’s Edge browser, you have to wait for a couple of days before they make it work on these browsers. The developers didn’t detail as to why the thumbnail preview is not available on all browsers at launch, considering the huge team that works on Youtube.
One of the biggest advantages the team says is that it will largely save people from creating clickbait thumbnail videos. The three seconds should give a quick sneak peak of the video and its actual content. It avoids fake and scam content to be promoted through Youtube. Besides, it also gets its source from multiple points in the video and not just the first three seconds. Youtube may choose to increase the time to five seconds. Clickbait people are not going to stop easily but this is a good start.