YouTube Introduces ‘YouTube Feather’: Bare-Boned YouTube Pages

Like YouTube, but you’ve had it with all the clutter? You need not answer my infomercial-esque rhetorical question, but you may be interested in YouTube Feather. While it’s an unusual name for a beta project, the word feather is actual representative of something in this case. Let’s put two and two together and say that a feather is light, and well, so is YouTube Feather!

When we say light, we’re talking about removing the clutter. Apparently, this was an issue for many YouTubers. So YouTube has essentially decided to offer up bare-boned lightweight pages for those who choose. Enabling the feather option will strip down many YouTube pages to their core essentials. Much of the navigation has been removed, some sharing options removed, and so forth. It’s completely opt-in, so only those who choose will see the changes.

YouTube says, “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.”

But if you’re looking to get rid of ads, sorry, today isn’t your day. You’ll still get an eye-full. Here’s the link again, should you choose to opt-in (completely reversible): http://www.youtube.com/feather_beta.

For those who have tried it: what do you think?