YouTube's video player (almost the entire rest of the site is beyond crap, don't get me wrong! I'm just talking about the watching experience) (assuming you have an ad-blocker, which you obviously should). Plenty of other video players have
some of these features, but YouTube has almost everything.
- click to pause
- double-click to fullscreen
- customisable captions
- speed controls
- sensible keyboard shortcuts for practically everything (press ? to see them all)
- theatre mode
- picture-in-picture
- loop (on the right-click menu)
- dark theme
- all settings are saved and synced across multiple tabs (with the irritating exception of video speed, but that can be fixed with a browser extension)
- hover to preview
- drag to seek
- video chapters
- clear and subtle indication of video buffering
- auto-resume when you come back to a video after navigating away
- easy and obvious translation of all controls to live-streams and "premieres"
- pretty animations and obvious cursor changes that make it really obvious what you're doing (looking at you, Twitch)
- you can scroll in fullscreen
- "instant" page navigation that never gets out of sync with itself
- 4K support
- HDR support (not very good, but still)
- 60+FPS support
- 360° support
- all of Google's CDN resources behind it so it never lags
- excellent video quality detection that never picks an unnecessarily low-quality option when my computer could handle better, nor a too-high one that my connection can't manage
- click to pause
- double-click to fullscreen
- customisable captions
- speed controls
- sensible keyboard shortcuts for practically everything (press ? to see them all)
- theatre mode
- picture-in-picture
- loop (on the right-click menu)
- dark theme
- all settings are saved and synced across multiple tabs (with the irritating exception of video speed, but that can be fixed with a browser extension)
- hover to preview
- drag to seek
- video chapters
- clear and subtle indication of video buffering
- auto-resume when you come back to a video after navigating away
- easy and obvious translation of all controls to live-streams and "premieres"
- pretty animations and obvious cursor changes that make it really obvious what you're doing (looking at you, Twitch)
- you can scroll in fullscreen
- "instant" page navigation that never gets out of sync with itself
- 4K support
- HDR support (not very good, but still)
- 60+FPS support
- 360° support
- all of Google's CDN resources behind it so it never lags
- excellent video quality detection that never picks an unnecessarily low-quality option when my computer could handle better, nor a too-high one that my connection can't manage