Technology All The Way

Soon after putting trimming down their home page, Google has come up with a beta version of doing the same to Youtube as well. The search Giant has introduced a beta version of Youtube called 'Feather' that introduces radical changes to the interface of layout of Youtube videos.

The goal is to provide content to the user with as minimum latency as possible. This will come at the price of a lot of features such as the inability to post comments, rating videos and customizing the embed layers. You would also lose the ability to read more than 10 comments for a video, although that does not seem to be like a huge limitation. It does this by turning off most of the AJAX features of the site. However, since the video player hasn't changed, the major chunk of speed will obviously depend upon the quality of the video that you are watching. But Feather gives you video a chance to hog a Feather share of the bandwidth since most of the 'less important feature' are no more.

To join this experiment, just head to this page. You can use the same page to leave the experiment later.

The new Youtube Feather reduces the total number of bytes that are downloaded by the browser by about 1/8, hence greatly reducing the response time for the user. Chrome's dev tools show that the improvements are noticeable: the resources downloaded when you watch a video only have 52 KB, instead of 391 KB.

The lite version is not available for all videos presently, but it could go site-wide at some point in the future.

In the recent past we also saw Facebook introducing 'Facebook Lite' for faster page loading times. Such features are going a great boon for the new wifi devices, for netbooks and for many countries where the internet speed is not comparable to the speed available in the west.