For many years, my experience with YouTube had been, consistently and on any computer/browser, that once a section of that video was loaded, or the whole video, if you wanted to see an earlier part of the video again, you could simply click on the loading bar to that area and you would instantly go to that part.
More recently (six months?) this has changed. Now, clicking in an earlier part of the video forces a reload of the whole video (that is, the grey bar goes back to 0) and you have to hope your loading will be fast enough to make waiting to watch it again even worth it. It is a huge regression in usability for me.
Is there any way to watch YouTube videos in the "old way"?
I use Firefox 17.0.1 at this point and have an updated (I think) Flash, but I'd be willing to try other browsers or versions if it made a difference.
EDIT: Yes, disabling DASH did the trick! Much better, thanks!
Best Answer
This is due to DASH, or Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP. Youtube introduced this new streaming protocol quite a while ago.
You can disable it via a browser extension called YouTube Center. Instructions on doing this are on this Lifehacker page. Basically, you download the addon for your browser of choice and manually install it by dragging on and dropping the extension file onto your browsers extension page.