YouTube 'Feather' Takes No Prisoners in the Pursuit of Page Speed

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 channe… (read more)