Right now I DO download the majority of vids before watching them, yes.
If I'm on liveleak or somewhere I'll open interesting vids in a new tab, as soon as they start playing click the little blue Download button from IDM. From there I may close the tab or read comments or whatever but no, I don't usually try to watch videos directly streaming.
I'm on the island of Borneo. Throwing more money at my ISP won't change anything.
What DOES change things is using IDM, because then it opens multiple threads and downloads at my ISPs max 150 kb/s, arranging the resulting vid into a single watchable file once downloaded. Opening normally means around 40 to 60 kb/s, which is indeed the land of stop and start.
Besides, it takes just a moment to delete downloaded vids, whereas it can be tricky or impossible to find online vids again. and watching them offline is very tricky indeed...
Happily I've found this, which seem to work with Chrome:
Free YouTube Downloader for Mac-Download YouTube Videos |iSkysoft
It's not as nice as IDM, for example doesn't show the download speed, I don't know if it can pick up and 'resume' a broken download or not, it doesn't download into categories and the download happens behind the scenes instead of being clearly visible on the taskbar. Because there's no taskbar...
It has however nudged my chances of buying a Mac desktop back towards positive (I'd say about 60% at this stage)
Thanks for the tip on Safari - I'll try it later.
P