YouTube’s supposed to be fun and easy to use; people want to visit the site and, in short order, view all sorts of interesting clips. Making things load more quickly is a solid goal, then, and Google’s pursuing it with the launch of a new project called “Feather.”
The official explanation states, “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.”
By Alex Chitu‘s count, Feather’s quite effective, too, taking that total from the neighborhood of 400 KB (391 KB, to be exact) to 52 KB. And it’ll probably be a rare person who can’t live without search suggestions, the option to make a comment, and the couple of other things it cuts.
Perhaps the one issue would-be users should watch out for is the fact that Feather doesn’t yet work for all videos.
Otherwise, this development counts as a very nice step forward in Google’s march to make the Web faster.
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