I don't like the new video player design

Question

I use Dropbox a lot of years now and liked most of the changes and new functions before. But absolutly not this time.

Since today Dropbox informes when opening a video with the player that a new user interface will be released at july 22th and I can opt back to old design until then.

So, cause usualy I liked the changes, I checked the new design and compared to the old one. And I have to say, I'm really disappointed. Cause not only do I see no new function to those which were already there like video editing, playing video including skipping 10 seconds forward or back, video disappointed (1080p and so on) and the "standard" dropbox functions like download, delete, rename, copy and so on.

But the first thing I noticed that - for no reason - the video doesn't have the full screen anymore. Even with 1920x1080p videos (full screen) there's a grey frame on every side that wasn't there with the old design. And I have no clue what logic reason could be for that.

The next things I miss are the information on the right side. One thing missing is the activity. Didn't need that very often, but sometimes it helped to take a look at it for the specific file. But cause of the new design you have to switch back to the file manager to see the file activity again. Could live with that, but it's additional work / time and cause of that unnecessary in the new design I'm not sure if we see other changes also in the file manager soon.

But a really useful information I had a look at regular basis is the file information like the file size, video resolution, frame rate, bitrate or audio codec. Now with the new video player design that information is completely gone, cause it's also nowhere inside the file manager interface. So there's no possible workaround inside Dropbox web interface to have this information. And cause I see no logic in "killing" such important information for viewing and editing videos, that gets me really angry.

Only the comments are still there at the right side.

So, unless the developers will fix such horrible changes, Dropbox will have one function less that could make Dropbox "attractive" for Business users like me.

Dropbox Video player - new design

Dropbox Video player - old design

Dropbox Video player - old design fullscreen

derrickyee · Answer

Hey Markus,

Thank you for your reply.

* Can you send a screenshot of the “border” of the played video that is being shown?
* We haven’t made any adjustments to the search experience in recent months. That being said - that is great feedback and I will take that back to the team
* I have made a ticket on our backlog to resolve the date issue with our engineering team.

Markus S. · Answer

Now it's two weeks later. Not only isn't any of this bugs fixed, nor is there any reaction from support or developers.

But the list of bugs gets bigger and bigger.

I just wanted to put a file in a subfolder by drag-and-drop as I did it in the past. But that doesn't work anymore.

And to top it your developers also ruined the user interface of the file manager by setting a dark grey background for the time information of videos, which is black. Which makes the time information nearly unreadable until you make the mouse of the file so it changed colors. And by the way, the grey in grey in black 'n' white isn't a nice view to say it in a mild way.

Markus S. · Answer

Since the last changes of the dropbox web interface, the file preview (especially at videos) and the file explorer I see more and more things that worked perfect in the past so that you could use and work with it in an effective way.

But now there a more and more things that you either changed on purpose so users can't work with it effectively anymore. Or the developers and the support didn't test it effectively and in different ways.

These are some mistakes I recognized the past days:

* The file preview still isn't fix (https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/View-download-and-export/I-don-t-like-the-new-video-player-design/m-p/698911), so there's still a "border" at every side of the played video. Annoyes me every time I watch a video, especially when it's full hd.
* When you open a folder, in the file / folder preview without searching there's still the additional info section on the right side so you can see the file date, size, document type, which folders it's in, the file thumbnail and you can add / change the tags.

But when you use a search, the info section is completely missed.

You could open the file for the additional information, but this takes additional steps / clicks, so more time. And in the file editing is no abilitly to change / edit the tags. As a workaround you now need to
* find which folder it's in
* open that folder
* manually scroll to that specific time and
* edit it without using the search inside the folde
But in folders with hundrets or thousands of files this takes a really long time and is really, really "time eating" and annoying.
* When you want to move a file from one folder to another (inside a big folder structure with 5 to 10 folder levels and a lot subfolders inside a folder) the folder selection windows thakes minutes and minutes and nothing happens. So at the moment the web interface is nearly useless for that part.
* Inside a folder you can't add tags to files / the folder anymore in an effective way. Cause when the tag is selected, in the past the cursor was still in the tag field. Now it loses the "focus" and switched back to the file selection section. So that way you don't add a second, third tag, but you switch to another file, beginning with the typed letter. So it's possible you don't regocnize you're using another file and edit the tags at the wrong file. Happened to me two times until I saw that bug.
* At some files you don't anymore when the file was changed / uploaded last time.

* When the information when the file was changed / uploaded is seen, the date is interpreted wrong. For example, the file in the screenshot was uploaded at 11th february 2022 (11.02.2022 in german writing), so about 18 months before.

But in the search results it seems to be interpreted as 11/02/2022 (US writing), so it's interpreted as 2nd november 2022, cause the month and day are switched. Which leads to the wrong time period of 8 months in the search results.