ImprovedTube
Version: 3.232 Web: https://github.com/ code4charity/YouTube-Extension
Here we have another good reason to write about YouTube and open source, but this time it has nothing to do with YouTube-dl – the pervasive back-end that powers dozens of GUIs for video downloading. Instead, we’ll keep watching YouTube videos using a web browser, but with a little helper called ImprovedTube.
This is a super-cool browser extension that adds a bunch of customisation options to the youtube.com website layout. Chromium, Firefox and all their scions are supported. The project description advertises ImprovedTube as having over 80 features that affect the looks and the behavior of YouTube. We were curious to give it a whirl, and it was really awesome!
When the extension is installed, its icon is greyed out until you open YouTube. Click the icon to reveal the menu and change something under any of the nine available categories. Dozens of useful settings reside there, and here are few examples. You can adjust the website layout, for example to make the YouTube logo smaller, tell the search bar to auto-hide and only pop up on mouse hover, apply a different theme (for a darker background), collapse and hide comments and more. Some handy quality-of-life features include forced theatre mode, explicitly defined video quality or subtitles mode, channel trailers autoplay switch, reversed playlist processing and whatnot.
With ImprovedTube, you can add certain videos to the blacklist, gather statistics with the built-in analyser and even define custom shortcuts. The abundance of tweaks is breathtaking! People who want to concentrate on videos can remove or hide all the unneeded stuff, while those who need the “social” side of YouTube – likes, comments, subscriptions or stream chats – will also be able to customise their set up accordingly. Userdefined shortcuts alone is a killer feature.