How to Give YouTube a “classic” Look in Firefox and Chrome
If you’re feeling nostalgic for the way YouTube was, or at least the way it looked before, you can come back. An extension called “YouTube Classic” for Firefox and Chrome allows you to change the look of the Web Video Center with a retro look that will return the site to its original look.
The content serving algorithms will remain unchanged, so you still get the YouTube 2019 experience, but the Classic extension makes noticeable styling changes on the YouTube homepage as well as on individual video pages. On the home page, each recommendation carousel shows fewer videos and changes the ad titles to Trends and Subscriptions tabs.
On a particular video page, the standard viewport is smaller and more square than the current version – 640 x 360 pixels in Classic versus 780 x 440 in Normal. You may also notice that some of the keyword text below the video has been moved: in classic mode, the channel name and subscribe button are right below the window, and the number of views has been shifted to the side. In general, thumbnails and text are usually smaller in classic mode, and the web app menu that helps you find sites like YouTube TV and YouTube Music has been removed.
If this sounds like what you like, give it a try. In Firefox, you can download the extension from the Mozilla Add-on Store . Things get a little more complicated in Chrome: Google removed the extension, so you need to download it from GitHub and then download it in Chrome in developer mode. This is much easier than it sounds.
First, go to the YouTube Classic extension page on GitHub and upload the files by clicking Clone or Upload and then Upload ZIP. Now that you have the file, activate Developer Mode in Chrome Settings, go to Settings, then More Tools, then Extensions and turn on Developer Mode. After enabling developer mode, a new set of buttons will drop down on the top menu bar: To download YouTube Classic, click Download Unpacked and select the folder you uploaded to Github. (This is called “youtube-classic-extension-master”). Once you’ve done that, YouTube Classic will appear at the top of your list of extensions, just like any others.
Once you’ve downloaded it, you can switch between modern and “classic” YouTube on the fly by toggling the icon next to the search bar and reloading the page. According to GHacks.Net , running the extension in classic mode should make YouTube faster, especially on Firefox. I haven’t noticed any significant changes myself, but have only done a couple of cursory tests, so it can do more on some systems than on others.