The Best Browser Extensions to Get More Out of YouTube

From wedding speeches to music videos, from DIY tutorials to movie clips, from celebrity interviews to remote wilderness adventures, it’s all on YouTube. Per YouTube’s official figures, more than 20 million videos are uploaded every day to the platform.

Over the years, YouTube has added a bunch of extra features to improve the viewing experience for its users, but you can enhance it even further with some well-chosen browser extensions. No matter how you use YouTube, there should be something that you can benefit from here.

We’ve focused on extensions for Google Chrome here, which should also work on Microsoft Edge and any other browser based on Chromium (including Opera and Vivaldi). We’re also going to steer clear of extensions based primarily around blocking ads, in the spirit of supporting content creators on YouTube.

Improve YouTube

Improve YouTube is one of the most comprehensive and longest-running YouTube extensions, and it brings with it a host of features. For a start, you can use it to change the look of the YouTube site in a variety of ways: Hide the sidebar or video thumbnails for a cleaner look, for example, or change the color of the progress bar and other elements.

Other tweaks you can apply include new tabs for search results (so you can find new videos without losing your place in the current one), the option to hide YouTube Shorts, and a reverse option for your playlists. You can also have videos pause when you switch tabs, and use the extension to set up custom keyboard shortcuts. There’s a lot here.

Enhancer for YouTube

This is another extension with a lot of strings to its bow. Enhancer for YouTube gives you quick and easy access to playback speed, quality, and volume, and more granular control over videos than the built-in YouTube options. The extension can also transform the look of YouTube with custom themes, like a bespoke dark mode look that offers dozens of variations.