There are a handful of places where you will likely be spending the majority of your itme online. You probably hit up Twitter and Facebook to catch up with some friends, Google to search for things, and Wikipedia to look up some quick facts. Where do you turn for video? Most people will say YouTube, but the site can be a little heavy for some netbooks and other portable devices.

In an effort to better accommodate these slower or underpowered computers, it seems the Google crew has come up with a lighter weight variant of the video-sharing site. Dubbed YouTube Feather, the opt-in beta takes away everything but the bare essentials.

You still get access to the full library of available videos and users have said that the difference in quality is negligible on the most part. Some beta users have said that they haven’t been able to access HQ videos, but the boys and girls and Lifehacker did not experience this problem.

With YouTube feather, you lose some of the more advanced features of YouTube, but most people are much more interested in just the videos themselves. You can check the Feather Beta on YouTube at your leisure.

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