Netbooks are forcing YouTube to conform to their twisted will

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I’ve been down on netbooks because a) they suck and b) they’re underpowered. Now, however, if your $299 kleinewunderbuk is too slow, the Internet has a fix.

YouTube, for example, can be a big resource hog on many netbooks. Streaming video through a Flash player? As if! The Space Shuttle can’t even do that kind of processing on the freaking fly!

Now there is YouTube Feather a stripped-down version of YouTube for people who can’t handle the full ‘Tube. Here’s how they describe it:

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.

Look, YouTube videos are up there with Christianity and Big Macs in terms of Things Americans Deserve. If you bought into the netbook craze and can’t use yours to watch YouTube, then by all means force the Internet to work around your limitations.

I mean you NEED to watch this, don’t you?