14 DAY TRIAL // No one is complaining that YouTube is slow, unless they have a really poor connection. Still, Google being the speedfreak that it is, thinks it can make it faster.
It believes, perhaps rightfully so, that faster playing videos result in people spending more time on the site and thus in the site making more money.
YouTube engineers are working on speeding up the site in several ways, as Gizmodo discovered. One simple way to get the video loading faster is to download in parallel all the various resources a site needs.
The JavaScript, the CSS, and the Flash Player all start coming down the pipe at the same time, and YouTube is already working on that.
But the benefits aren't great. Another thing that YouTube is working on, that some users have already seen in testing, is skipping the reloading of the player and the resources.
Most people don't watch just one video on the site. So after the initial loading process, YouTube keeps all the resources loaded when you move to another page.
Using JavaScript, YouTube only updates the actual video, the related videos, the uploader's info, and so on, things that change from one video page to the other. But the JavaScript, the CSS, and the Flash player are the same on every page, so they stay in memory ready for reuse.
It gets even more interesting. YouTube is also working on ways of loading videos before you even realize you want to see them.
For example, it could pre-load the first seconds of videos from the related category or suggestions. This way, if you do decide to click on one of the videos, the beginning is already on your computer and the video starts playing almost instantly.
Google is a big fan of pre-loading content. Chrome employs an algorithm to predict what sites you're going to visit first to start loading them in the background.