Netflix Web player redesigned

As I began to watch my daily dose of Scrubs on Netflix this afternoon, I noticed something different in the service's Web player. Instead of seeing all the buttons around the interface, they now only appear upon hover-over -- just like the old fullscreen mode. You can see an example of the new user interface above.

Important: Some users have been experiencing issues with the new interface in Google Chrome. If this is happening to you, then it's likely that your browser is out of date, so go update it and try again.

I also noticed that when the player is left inactive and paused for about ten seconds, it will display the media's title and description, along with the episode number if there is one. Very nifty redesign, Netflix. I actually like it a lot.

The Web player still uses Microsoft's Silverlight engine for playback, but it has much fancier buttons with little animations that give it a bit more flare than before. They also inform you of things. For example, hovering over the next (->) button will tell you what the next episode is and give you a brief description of it.

I really like how it takes up the whole browser window now instead of being confined with padding on the top and bottom. As for the interface as a whole, it's clean and has good taste -- much better than that of the previous design.

One last little find is the new episodes button that can be hovered over to reveal other episodes in the season that you're currently watching, along with an option to move to another season. This is actually really nice if you watch lots of TV shows because there's no need to go back to the Watch Instantly page and then to the TV show just so that you can find a certain episode you want to jump to.