I've been quite puzzled lately. My default browser of choice is firefox but I've found that sometimes I need to pause a video on youtube to let it load/buffer(usually at the "peak" times) to watch it smoothly.

Then one day at random I tried watching youtube on Internet explorer 8 and all videos seem to load so much faster, even HD videos.

This got me curious and I did more tests with google chrome and safari.

The final results for me places the browsers in the following order for youtube buffering speed:

1. Internet explorer 8 - Always loads youtube videos the fastest, never have to pause videos at all not even HD ones.

2. Safari 4 - Pretty good I'd say close to IE8's performance maybe about 20-30% slower.

3. Firefox and Chrome - They seem to be tied in terms of youtube performance. Sometimes it'll load fine, sometimes I'll have to pause it for 1 minute so I can watch videos without any lag.

Now this really puzzles me, I don't see any reason why any browser should be faster than the other. As far as I know, the only thing that should affect the load times is your connection speed.

So my question is, has anyone else noticed this? and does anyone have an idea what could be causing this?