Slow YouTube? Try Feather, Made for India

The internet is hurtling along at a fast pace moving from GIF animated images to full HD video. However, for us Indians, the wonders of the internet are still one long progress bar away.

While YouTube happily launched 1080p HD video support, we’ve just started putting away our VCDs. Finland may have made 1 Mbps connections a legal right, but we have to pay through our nose for even half of that.

Google with the noble aim of shaving a few seconds of loading time, has now done us Indians a favor by adding a new “Feather” experiment on their TestTube. TestTube for YouTube is the equivalent of the “Lab” features you find on GMail and allows you to participate in Google experimental features for their products.

The new “Feathers” experiment makes the YouTube interface much lighter, by putting focus on the most important thing people use YouTube for, the videos. With the “Feathers” experiment enabled, your videos will now default to standard quality, and the video page will only show a limited number of comments, and related features.

Good work Google! This will keep us busy till we get affordable 16 Mbps connections here too. Of course, by then, the world would’ve moved on to ultra-high super-duper resolution.