I don’t know how youtube does it, but decoding a video, say with libavcodec(ffmpeg) without GPU acceleration is pretty demanding. They could do it on their server and send you the stream, but then again they’d save a lot of money not doing that.
But I agree it shouldn’t take so much when nothing is happening, the web has very much become so bloated.
At least on linux you have the choice. Somehow however, it seems so many people like to recreate or even worsen the windows experience. I guess Unixporn didn’t make it to lemmy, but half of those did not feel usable. Why would I want one inch wide gaps between everything?
I can only assume these always existed, otherwise it would have been a nightmare for everyone.
Only since vista, it used to be localized.
True, but in the end it’s ffmpeg doing the work for both (at least on a linux system).