It's almost funny, not to mention sad, that their player/page has been changed, filling it with tons of JS that makes less powerful machines lag.

For a while now, I've been forced to change "watch?v=" to "/embed/" to watch something in 480p on an i3 Gen 4, where the same video, when downloaded, uses ~3% of the CPU.

However, unfortunately, it doesn't always work anymore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvFZjo5PgG0 https://www.youtube.com/embed/xvFZjo5PgG0

While they worsen the user experience, other sites optimize their players and don't seem to care about downloaders (pr0n sites, for example).

Many performance problems on YouTube are because they now force everyone to use the latest heavy codecs, even when your hardware does not have acceleration for it. I have a laptop that is plenty powerful for everything else and plays 4K h264 no problem. 720p on YouTube on the other hand turns it into a hot slate after a minute and grinds everything to a halt.

There are browser extensions like h264ify that block newer codecs but WHY??? Is nobody at YouTube caring about the user experience? It’s easier and more reliable to just download the videos.

Put that next to GitHub. The app is nearly unusable on an i5 8th, often I just download a snapshot to browse locally.

You are not alone. In Q1 2025 I was forced to adopt the embed player. In Q3 2025, google intentionally broke the embed player. Now the only youtube access I have is via yt-dlp. Long live yt-dlp and its developers

Personally I am looking to get away from Youtube and looking towards some form of PeerTube/peer-based platform.