Make YouTube run better: HTML5 & Feather

YouTube and my Mac do not get along. Actually Flash and my Mac don’t get along. As soon as a Flash video starts playing the fan kicks in, the computer gets too hot, the video stutters, and things get a bit crashy. At first I thought it was just me, but it appears Flash runs less well on the Mac than on Windows (unlike Windows, Mac OS X does not expose access to the APIs required  to allow hardware decoding of H.264).

So what’s a Mac owner (or anyone who wants to avoid Flash) to do? Well, if you are using Google Chrome, Apple Safari (version 4+), or IE with the Google Chrome Frame installed, you can opt to use the HTML5 player instead of the Flash player. Using the HTML5 player, my computer is much quieter and less crashy.

Feather is another YouTube opt-in beta project. Intended for people on older computers, netbooks, or slow connections, Feather presents you with a stripped down YoutTube that is much snappier, especially on less powerful machines.

You can find these, as well as other in-development projects on YouTube’s TestTube.