YouTube’s not-so-secret beta modes

LO AND BEHOLD! FROM THE DEVELOPERS SKIES,
COMES A MIRACLE NEW SHINY THING YOUTUBE!

Or, you know, YouTube’s been playing around with developing stuff again. It’s totally not something that randomly fell from the skies, awesome as that would be. Maybe I should pretend that it did? :)

In the oft-overlooked “What’s New” section, there are two new-ish “beta” modes, so that you can experiment with YouTube’s design changes/thoughts: one of them, the “new video page” is also known as the “Feather” beta, and the other is the new HTML5 video player.

“Feather”, so named because of the lighter coding and therefore quicker loading, is no longer an opt-in beta. Instead, simply clicking the link “New Video Page” changes your YouTube design from the old and familiar to a new and much cleaner viewing page, still divided into frames, but without the markings to indicate it as such:

New video-watch page design.
Click for (much) larger image.

While a lot of the comments seem pretty negative so far (gee, where have I heard that before? ), I actually really like this design. As I said, it has a ‘cleaner’ look to it without the frames, and anything that looks less cluttered is just fine in my book.

Aside from the “new video page”, which I have no doubt YouTube won’t wait too long on making official, there is the new HTML5 player – kind of exciting for a geek like me. HTML5 (link to Wiki) is the “next major version of HTML” (which is kind of what runs the internet, to the tech-tarded).

YouTube’s HTML5 player has some changes from the original, too. At the moment (while it is in beta), the player doesn’t play videos with ads – those get played by the default Flash-based player. By the play button, there is an raise-up area that allows you to change the speed of the video playback (turtle = slowest, rabbit = fastest). The player doesn’t support full-screen in all browsers yet, and the beta itself is supported in the latest versions of Google Chrome and Apple Safari, as well as Internet Explorer (if you have the Google Chrome frameset installed).

So go and play around with it, folks! You can opt in or leave the HTML5 player beta any time you want, so you might as well try it out and see what you think!