The company will unveil the new design at m.youtube.com this afternoon, said Andrey Doronichev, product manager for YouTube Mobile, during a briefing Wednesday morning here at YouTube’s headquarters. The main idea is to replicate the desktop PC-based YouTube experience in the mobile browser, or to at least get as close as possible, he said.


At the moment, mobile YouTube visitors play around 100 million videos a day, Doronichev said; roughly equivalent to the same number of videos that were being played on the original YouTube site when it was acquired by Google in 2006. But the mobile site itself is hard to navigate, and the primary source of mobile YouTube viewing–the native iPhone application–has lagged behind the development pace of what’s now possible in the browser, he said.

The new site, as might be expected from a Google effort, is an HTML5-compatible site that provides much faster navigation and better video quality than the old mobile site, Doronichev demonstrated Wednesday. It was also designed to be more touch-screen friendly than the older site, with better navigation options.

The motivation behind the redesign is clear: Google and YouTube want more mobile users watching video through the browser, rather than native applications. That allows Google to control the advertising experience those viewers see rather than the handset maker, and fits in nicely with Google’s the-browser-is-the-operating-system philosophy for the future.

Mobile users should be able to check out the new site Wednesday afternoon, but a few bugs will prevent iPhone 4 users from being able to see the new site right away, Doronichev said. Those should be fixed soon, he said.

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Google has plugged the hole hackers used Sunday morning to festoon YouTube videos with off-color pop-ups and adult-site redirects, according to a news outlet.


Hackers took advantage of a cross-site scripting vulnerability that enabled them to insert code onto the popular video site’s viewer-comments pages, IDG News Service said in a report. The hackers apparently had it in for Justin Bieber, focusing on clips related to the teen pop star, who’s set to appear tonight on an NBC television celebration of the Fourth of July and who’s reportedly one of the most popular attractions on YouTube.

According to IDG, a Google representative said the attackers’ exploits would not have allowed them to access the Google accounts of YouTube visitors who encountered a hacked page. The representative said, though, that visitors should log out of their Google accounts and then log back in, just to be safe.

IDG also quoted a source who said that though the hack itself didn’t involve malware, any landing pages to which visitors were redirected could have. The source said, however, that most antivirus software would be defense enough against that possibility.

Google said YouTube’s comment sections were temporarily shut down in response to the hack.

“Comments were temporarily hidden by default within an hour [of discovering the problem], and we released a complete fix for the issue in about two hours,” IDG quoted the company as saying. “We’re continuing to study the vulnerability to help prevent similar issues in the future.”

Source: Cnet

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