I hate youtube for all the Flash animations sucking down CPU and eating my battery life when I look at my friends page.

1. Nothing animates until you click on it;
2. You can turn it off;
3. Welcome to the twenty-first fucking century, luddite.

Strangely enough, it causes my browser's CPU usage to go from about 3% to about 8% even with Flashblock. That cuts my battery life from about 4.5 hours to 3.7 or so because the usage never goes back down until I restart Firefox. I have hope that thumbnailing will fix that though.

Thank for a helpful response. :-) Even Flashblock doesn't quite do it, but it looks like that will.

I hate that Youtube uses Flash because there are many standard widely supported video formats they could use instead that don't require a proprietary piece of technology to work. But my friends still often post videos I enjoy seeing and that option gives me the best of both worlds.

Well, I know that all the systems I've used support mpeg2 and 4. Perhaps they are not open (though they are at least de-facto open, like mp3), or perhaps they require too much bandwidth. I don't know. But they are widely supported.

See this comment.