I’ve never personally had a problem with videos loading but it appears You Tube feels this is a problem that needs to be addressed. Of Course for users with a low speed internet connection or on a mobile device this new ” Feather ” edition of You Tube may be just what your looking for.
This ” Feather ” edition of You Tube is now available as an opt-in beta, Feather attempts to make the whole You Tube experience more lightweight, quicker and simpler. You can opt-in to the beta here but remember You Tube are saying “It is a work in progress and may not work for all videos”
Feather does a number of things in an attempt to speed up the You Tube experience. For example it resorts to the original quality video playback as it’s default instead of “High Quality” or “High Definition”. It also removes features such as the ability to change the players size ( full screen mode is still available ), but gone are the “open in a new window” and the ” Turn down the lights feature”. Video replies and also options to change the embedded options are gone, as well as the auto suggest from You Tube’s search bar.
Comments are limited to just 10 and users are now unable to vote on or respond to them. Related videos are still there, but this time there is only 5, compared to the normal amount of 21. The option of more info for a video description also seems to be gone as well and less detailed account information is available when you are logged in (Number of unread messages etc..)
The “Feather” project is intended to serve YouTube video watch pages with the lowest latency possible. It achieves this by severely limiting the features available to the viewer and making use of advanced web techniques for reducing the total amount of bytes downloaded by the browser
So if your looking to speed up your video experience why not give it a go, I would especially recommend it if you have a slow internet connection and are having to wait for a video to load before you can watch it. Just opt in here, but remember that it’s still in beta so some glitches are bound to occur, and it appears it’s mainly more popular videos that are supporting this feature at the moment. And if you find it’s not for you, it’s easy to opt out with the green button on the bottom right.
What you think of this feature, does it speed up your video load times? Let us know in the comments
See the below picture from Cnet to see the differences yourself
- Click To Enlarge (Credit: CNET)
Source:
