This Is Possibly the Only YouTube Browser Extension You’ll Ever Need.
YouTube is a real mixed bag. It’s home to many of our favorite web content, but the experience of using the website itself leaves a lot to be desired – filled with distracting recommendations, poor personalization and ads, ads, ads – unless you take advantage of the desktop browser extensions that can make it better.
I used to rely on a lot of little add-ons to remove unnecessary recommendations, clean up the YouTube home page and make up for the lack of personalization options, but there is a powerful open source extension called Improve YouTube that does all of this and more. , all by itself.
I installed Improve YouTube after reading the praise of gHacks for its set of extension features – there are over 80 of them so far, with more being added regularly. It does everything from equipping a YouTube website ( or web app ) with improved controls and layout options to blocking ads, comments and unwanted channel recommendations, and more .
The YouTube enhancement is available for FireFox and Chrome (and therefore other Chromium browsers like Edge) and both versions have the same capabilities. To get started, download Improve YouTube for your browser, then click the Improve Tube icon next to the address bar. From there, you can choose from nine menus to access the many features of Improve Tube:
- General includes switches for changing basic actions such as flagging watched videos, changing the appearance of thumbnails, changing the default landing page, and more.
- Appearance is a visual customization menu that lets you rearrange or hide almost every element of your website. I removed the Related Videos section and hid the comments because honestly, no one needs to read YouTube comments.
- Theme lets you apply custom themes to YouTube, change font sizes and colors, and even include a built-in blue light filter. And for those nostalgic (or stubborn), you can even restore the “classic” YouTube layout if you like.
- The Player menu allows you to customize your video player and customize the default YouTube video and audio quality. You can even add additional video controls like play speed, loop, screenshot and video rotation buttons.
- Playlist allows you to change the default playlist and autoplay behavior.
- Channel has options for what you see when you open a specific channel.
- Shortcuts let you change or add keyboard shortcuts to control your website and web player.
- The Blacklist menu is used to block entire channels or specific videos.
- The Analyzer will collect your YouTube usage data. It is disabled by default.
For a complete list of YouTube Improve features (and guides on how to use them), see the Firefox and Chrome extensions pages. You can also check out open source and read additional documentation on the project’s GitHub page and on the official website .
This is just a rundown of the full YouTube Enhancement feature set, but there is a lot more to explore, including minor but useful tweaks such as changing video autoplay settings and adding new keyboard shortcuts. Other, larger features include ad blocking, bandwidth limiter, windowed full screen, and more.
Honestly, there are some things you can’t do with Improve YouTube, like organizing your subscriptions into folders, but it’s more than likely that it is capable of doing the job of most or all of your current YouTube-related browser extensions.