14 DAY TRIAL // Google loves speed, it's no mystery to anyone, and it also loves simplicity. With this in mind you'd think that its engineers can't really do that much to get things significantly faster, certainly not for its main products. Yet, Google keeps on trying sometimes with surprising results. The Google homepage just got a significant update, technically it's not faster, but it does take the company's minimalistic approach to the extreme, but the YouTube team is also running an interesting test with a similar attitude, strip down everything to make the site faster and lighter.
As the Google Operating System blog noticed, YouTube is running an experimental opt-in program dubbed Feather designed to see just how much can the designers can take out without affecting the experience. A lot, as it turns out, enabling the feature will get rid of the comments, share links, playlists – virtually any non-essential feature – and also remove most of the scripts from the page. HQ videos will also load in SQ by default.
The result is a lightning-fast, “feather”-light page five times smaller than the original (about 65 KB versus around 300 KB) and loading three times as fast (from a little over 2 seconds to around 650 ms). The numbers were gathered Chrome's recently updated dev tools and are just for one video, on one browser (the latest Chrome dev channel build) so they aren't exactly scientific, but big differences should be seen across the board for the videos where the feature is active roughly with the same proportions.
“This is an opt-in beta for "Feather" support on YouTube. 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. It is a work in progress and may not work for all videos,” YouTube describes the experiment.
There's little doubt that this is a very experimental feature and it's unlikely that YouTube will go to such extremes just to get loading times down as most of the additional features besides just watching videos are removed. You may be thinking that no one really reads let alone writes YouTube comments, except for the millions that do obviously, but YouTube has to please everyone. Some aspects of tested features and lessons learned in the experiment are bound to make their way to the proper site at some point in the future though, and YouTube may even launch something like Facebook Like, but we'll just have to wait and see for now.
