CipherLens

Make YouTube behave: your grid, max quality, speed, and a theater mode that fills the window, minus the Shorts and paid-promo stuff.

I was running two extensions just to keep YouTube usable: one to fix how many videos fit in a row, and one to stop every video from defaulting to a resolution my monitor can't even show. Then the resolution one vanished from the store. CipherLens is the replacement: one small extension that does both jobs, plus a few other things that were bugging me anyway. What's in it: - Videos per row: pick how many videos the home grid shows (3 to 8) instead of whatever YouTube feels like this month. - Max resolution: set a cap and every video just plays at it, or the closest quality below. You stop touching the gear icon entirely. - Playback speed: pick a default and every video starts there. - Disable autoplay: keeps YouTube's autoplay switch off, so finishing a video doesn't launch you into the next one. - Theater mode that fills the window: YouTube stops theater mode well short of your screen, and on a big monitor it's mostly black bars. CipherLens lets the player use the whole window. On YouTube's new watch layout there's also a little bar under the player you can drag to make it smaller, and it remembers the size you pick. - Default to theater mode: every video opens in theater mode. YouTube's new layout forgets it on every reload; this doesn't. - Hide the paid promotion badge: that hover overlay that sits right where you're about to click? Gone. - Hide Shorts: shelves, the sidebar link, search results, channel tabs. All of it. - Hide games: the Playables shelves nobody asked for. - Hide featured banner: the giant movie and brand banners that take over the top of the home page. - Hide topic shelves: the "Explore more topics" rows wedged into your feed. - Hide watched videos: clears stuff you've already seen out of home, subscriptions, and search. Your history page stays exactly as it is. It's all toggles and dropdowns in one little popup, changes apply the moment you flip them, and your settings follow your Chrome profile. No accounts, no tracking, no requests to anywhere. It runs on youtube.com and nowhere else.