Now, if you've been on the internet a bit longer, you may remember those sites at the end of the 90s telling you that they're »best viewed with a resolution of 1024x768 and the Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6.0". Luckily, most of those pages disappeared with the upcoming success of Mozilla Firefox and others (oh, there are still some, e. g. the cinema in my home town, but ie6 runs on wine).

As you may know, I'm a happy KDE user and have been using Konqueror as my everyday browser for some time now. Recently, I discovered more and more pages I couldn't use any more. I had to start this thing called Firefox. I don't like it, but that is not the point here.
I even noticed today that ebay has a new interface that konqueror doens't like.

This is a result of the more and more upcoming AJAX/JavaScript-stuff, which is often nice, I saw a lot of well designed web applications lately (ok, I saw a lot of crap, too). I'm not enough into JavaScript to know if it's the lack of support by Konqueror or the pages. I just hope that people will come together and find solutions for that. I remember that there was some discussion about using webcore (the khtml-fork used by apples safari) for konqueror, don't know if that would make it better, maybe some users of this drm-crippled system could comment on that.

If you've been surfing around the internet lately, you probably noticed that videos are often provided via some strange flash-players. That's ugly, because a) you can't download them and b) you need the proprietary flash-plugin. If you have a deeper look into how those flash-stuff works, it's basically just a small applet getting a flv-file (Flash Video) via http. Now, in theory you can use some sniffer like wireshark to get the url or directly the full video. But you'd still need to run the applet in some way.

But there are better solutions, at least for the most common service youtube (google video has recently added download links, so that's fine for now). The URLs are standardized and can be extracted from the page source.

Konqueror users can get this small extension, which will add a context menu for youtube under right click -> actions. Firefox-users can get VideoDownloader (which supports much more video platforms).
As Eiferer noted in the comments, VideoDownloader is SpyWare, so I'd suggest you don't use that. There's another one, based on greasemonkey, here, and, a platform independent bookmarklet here.

Now, playing flv is supported by ffmpeg, so all common linux-players should be able to play them. Thus you can get those videos and play them without using any proprietary software.