The Netflix player window is simple, with a play/pause button, a progress bar, volume controls, and a Full Screen button, as well as a Back to Browsing button that returns to you where you were before you pressed Play. You can slide the controller on the progress bar to skip to any part of the video, which begins to play again after a brief pause for buffering.

The size of the playback window is variable, too. It appears to be fixed to a minimum width of 720 pixels, but as you expand the size of your Web browser window, the video scales to fill the space.

Navigation within a video, with thumbnails.As on the Roku Netflix Player, when you slide the progress bar, the Netflix Player displays a thumbnail preview of where you are within the video, with smaller thumbnail images on either side. (The thumbnails appeared on many, though not all, of the videos I tested.) It's a useful way to quickly find a particular scene without all the bandwidth that a true fast-forward effect would have.

The video quality itself is about what I have come to expect from Netflix Instant Watching: It's a bit soft, but extremely watchable. (Here's a .) Nobody will mistake it for high-def, but it still looks pretty good. (Video quality also varies from item to item--some classic British TV shows look downright terrible, and some recent Hollywood films look great.)

Unlike some (usually Flash-based) Web video players, the Netflix Player didn't drop frames in full-screen mode. However, I found that full-screen mode occasionally didn't work properly--sometimes I would only see a still image. And on my two-monitor Mac, I couldn't get full-screen mode to use my secondary display.