OK, anyone currently working on a browser add-on to customise YouTube can stop now. YouTube Plus, available for both Chrome and Firefox, has basically dropped the mic when it comes to tweaking your online video-watching experience.
If you’ve ever found the standard YouTube user interface lacking, then YouTube Plus has every knob and dial you could possible want to tweak.
You can check out a full list of features on the extension’s GitHub page, but here’s the condensed version:
- Disable advertisements outside the video page
- Enable infinite scroll in feeds
- Enable pop-out mode
- Remove autoplay up next
- Disable hovercards
- Hide footer
- Hide recommended channels sidebar
- Hide search results sidebar
- Hide channel sidebar
- Disable advertisements in the video page
- Player always visible when reading comments
- Disable YouTube loudness normalisation
- Change volume with mouse wheel
- Disable DASH playback
- Disable HFR (60fps)
- Use the HTML5 player when possible
- Video blacklist
- Take screenshot
- Pop-out video
- Fullbrowser mode
- Cinema mode
- Frame by frame
You even have a choice when it comes to installation — native Firefox and Chrome extensions, or scripts compatible with Greasemonkey and Tampermonkey. The icing on the cake is that it’s open source, so if you want to just check out the code or make your own tweaks, you’re free to do so.
One feature I’d like to see is something like h264ify, which forces YouTube to play the H.264-encoded video rather than VP8, which isn’t hardware-accelerated in most cases. Not a big deal, but it’d certainly be nice to have.
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