YouTube “Feather”: Ultra-light version for netbooks

YouTube has introduced the “Feather” Beta, which is a trimmed down version of YouTube designed to run on netbooks/low-powered PCs running on low-bandwidth connections. It is designed to watch videos with the lowest latency possible by limiting the features available to viewers and reducing the amount of bytes downloaded by the browser.

The changes include the player defaulting to standard quality, reducing comments displayed to 10 and removing sharing and embedding options. The auto-suggest search bar and related videos have also been removed. With the advent of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 and GPU-accelerated playback, YouTube playback is unlikely to trouble ION-powered netbooks. However, for everyone else, this new version is probably worth a try, especially if you don’t use the removed features much anyway.

You can check out the YouTube “Feather” opt-in beta here. Just click on the “Join the ‘Feather’ Beta” link. Remember this is currently work in progress so not all videos will work right now.