CUSTOMISE HOW YOUTUBE LOOKS AND WORKS

In this feature, we’ve highlighted tools that make specific improvements to YouTube, but you can combine their functions by installing the brilliant browser extension Improve YouTube. Available for Chromium (www.snipca. com/48812) and Firefox (www.snipca. com/48813), this add-on has more than 85 options for customising how YouTube looks and works.

Improve YouTube can block ads, hide Shorts clips, disable autoplay, enhance picture quality, normalise volume, take screenshots, adjust playback speed and much more. Its features are organised into logical sections and can be switched on or off with a single click, with many controllable using keyboard shortcuts.

Particularly useful are its Appearance and Themes tabs (see screenshot), which let you redesign YouTube’s interface as you prefer. You can change the size and position of the video player, descriptions, comments and sidebar, and apply a range of attractive themes that look much smarter than the site’s default dark mode.

Hopefully, Improve YouTube won’t fall foul of YouTube’s strict new restrictions, as has happened with the multi-option extension ‘Enhancer for YouTube’. The latter’s developer says its Firefox version is now completely broken and the Chromium one only partially works, because of the “countless changes” made by YouTube (see www.snipca.com/48814).