@tomxcd@fedi.nullob.si Luckily it has an API that Invidious, youtube-dl and others use so you can, in theory, get any UI you want. With a browser extension for example, "Enhancer for Youtube" is nice. Too many features for me though and I use youtube-dl most of the time if I really want to watch something.
@ryan
Just how old exactly your hardware is? 😯
With youtube-dl and mpv I can play Youtube videos in 1080p even on my Thinkpad T43 that is around 17 years old! Still a capable machine, I can even get a ~2 hour battery life out of mine, but it's crazy to use it as a daily driver.
@tomxcd@fedi.nullob.si
@ryan
As for the modern resource-hungry browsers, try an extension like "Auto Tab Discard" it suspends the tabs you don't actively use, but you can always get back to it if you want to, this way only a small number of them (8 for me) remain active — browser is no longer a monstrosity that can eat up all RAM.
@tomxcd@fedi.nullob.si
@ryan
> It just amazes me how much bloat has been normalized on the web.
Yeah, and it only gets worse! The computers that were used to edit video not that long ago slow down to a crawl when you open a website that can… display text and images, exactly like 20 years ago, but now it requires much beefier machine all of a sudden. It's just crazy 🤪
The browsers got much more complex, I don't think we can still call them browsers, they are more like web platforms now. OS on top of OS.
@tomxcd@fedi.nullob.si