Welcome to NewTube – HTML5 + Sneak Peek Tip

YouTube and Google have been update crazy this month. Apparently the Google engineers are doing more than growing facial hair and thinking about their tongues.

New YouTube Start Page

The image above is a sneak peek at the new YouTube start page. It wasn’t intended to be public but a single command can enable anyone to use it right now.

This command will give you the cookie you need to see the new layout:
javascript:document.cookie=”VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=ST1Ti53r4fU”;

To enter the command in Chrome, you can paste it into the address bar and if it removes/culls the “javascript:” part, just put it back in and hit enter. Now you’ll have the cookie and going to YouTube’s homepage will show the new screen.

Optionally with other browsers you can get into the developer console and run the javascript command from there.

If that’s not enough fun for you, HTML5 features are almost completely caught-up with Flash versions of the YouTube player, and in many ways it’s better.

No tricks needed here, just head over to the YouTube HTML5 page and click on the ‘Join’ button on the bottom of the page.

Once that’s done you should notice a much different menu when you right click on videos that support the HTML5 player:

HTML5 Video Playback on YouTube

One other “TIL” was the speed test pages linked from the HTML5 page:

Performance tests on YouTube

Performance graphs on YouTube

And even a real-time streaming benchmark:

Performance graphs on YouTube

From the looks of things this could be the year that YouTube drops flash entirely, or at the very least makes it the ‘other option’ with HTML5 as the default. I’d personally love to uninstall flash and that would be one big hurdle down if YouTube switches completely. *fingers crossed*