[emilfihlman]

>This manifests as buffering on slower connections, where YouTube or Vimeo would just downgrade the user to a lower bitrate transparently (or nearly transparently).

As a user, I _never_ want to watch shit quality content and _MUCH_ prefer buffering to it.

[Multicomp]

I admit I too wish I could buffer video.

Back in the day, you could open a tab, hit pause, go back to whatever you are reading, and by the time you finish that article and maybe grab a cup of coffee, the video is fully loaded and you can watch at your leisure.

These days, all the websites are so smart that they realise that you are not on the tab and load nothing so even though the page is been open for 20-minutes, you still have the lovely privilege of sitting there staring at the throbber every so often, thanks to your work insisting on full VPN tunnelling.

[dspillett]

> thanks to your work insisting on full VPN tunnelling

Do work in a VM on your main machine. That way you can have full VPN tunnelling in the VM but the host (and other VMs if you use them) use your normal direct connectivity.

Of course you might be breaking rules in a way that might invite discipline, if working in a highly regulated environment where so measures are essentially dictated by your work's clients, by taking technical measures to circumvent policy, so take care.

[ballenf]

Or just get an iPad, Chromebook or the like for your media consumption.