My main issue is the things damn insistence on flash. I want my MacBook battery to last. My recent solution has been to enable developer mode, change user agent to iPad, and all is well. But why the hell does it just flat out refuse to play when you don't have flash installed - even though it can?
There's youtube-dl which supports a whole slew of video sites and updates really quickly when things break. This lets you download content locally, play it via your choice of player, and avoid a whole mass of embedded-browser-player issues. It's generally my preferred route for playing videos, though I'll generally preview a few minutes (or watch shorter ones entirely) in a browser.
The negative of non-Flash movies (YouTube has some) is that they auto-play. Few things annoy me faster than sound coming from a background tab. I generally close them immediately (I usually queue up stuff to look at).
How old is your Mac? Flash has hardware acceleration since 2010 or so.
And if you do have a Mac built in the last 4 years, you're not missing much by using Flash. Difference in CPU usage is negligible and I haven't used an in-browser HTML5 player that wasn't shitty compared to its Flash implementation.
A few months. I was about to tell you I haven't installed it due to benchmarks that show the great power drain - then I noticed that all coincide with the time period you mention. Its funny, I only have issues with YouTube, nothing else. Guess I can't justify not having it now!
