If your poor piddling netbook is flapping, floundering and becoming formidably flummoxed and foxed when it’s asked to play back YouTube videos, help is at hand in the shape of a new lightweight version of the video sharing site.
Appropriately called Feather, the stripped out version dumps the ability to view videos in High Quality mode, and shunts out most of the commenting and sharing options to give you a lean’n’mean interface.
Here’s how Google introduce the beta service:
This is an opt-in beta for “Feather” support on YouTube. 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. It is a work in progress and may not work for all videos.
You can try Feather – and a whole host of other interesting YouTube beta apps – at their Test Tube page.
