4 ms·

I assume such senior engineers who used to care about page weight have left YouTube by now. The trend of every big site (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) is to go to

• Gigachad 4y ago
  Im gonna assume that users of YouTube can probably tolerate a one time multi megabyte download before streaming hundreds to thousands of megabytes of video.
  • owl57 4y ago
    On a bad enough connection YouTube can switch to 144p, that's on the order of one megabyte per minute.
  • naillo 4y ago
    Slightly tangential but if you've ever looked at the data transferred on a youtube video in the network tab they're actually suprisingly tiny (as far as I've seen). Often only like 10 MB for multi minute downloads. Top notch compression (not surprising).
    • Gigachad 4y ago
      If you are on your phone that's probably true. But on my desktop it defaults to 4k and sometimes 60fps which still comes out to some pretty big file sizes. I have never once been inconvenienced by the initial JS bundle download of youtube. After the first load, the site functions almost like a native app with very snappy page changes.
  • earthboundkid 4y ago
    YouTube logs me out and deletes my preferences every week or so. I doubt the page cache is “one time”.