Focus for YouTube

Watch YouTube on your own terms: hide the feed, Shorts, counts and autoplay, so what you watch is your choice, not the algorithm's.

A simple extension for YouTube that tells you why each thing pulls at your attention, the actual behavioral-science reasoning behind variable-ratio rewards, social proof, and default effects , so you're making an informed choice about what to turn off. Everything is opt-in and adjustable from the toolbar popup. Nothing here blocks YouTube or stops you from doing anything; it just removes the parts of the interface designed to keep you scrolling past the point you meant to stop. ON THE HOME PAGE, hide any combination of: the recommended feed (replaced with a simple "search for what you came for" message instead of a blank hole), the Shorts shelf, the left sidebar, the notifications bell, category filter chips, view counts on thumbnails, and grayscale mode for thumbnail images. ON THE VIDEO PAGE, hide: the related-videos sidebar, comments, end-of-video suggestions, view/like/subscriber/comment counts, and grayscale thumbnails in the sidebar. Reply counts and comment-like counts are blurred rather than hidden outright, so the buttons stay fully clickable, you can still open a reply thread on a whim, just without the number nudging the decision. You can also turn off autoplay automatically and make an exception to keep the sidebar visible specifically inside playlists, where "up next" is actually useful. Choose whether hidden elements only disappear while a video is actively playing (reappearing when you pause) or stay hidden all the time. DOOM-SCROLL CHECK-IN: tracks how many videos you've watched and how long, across all your YouTube tabs, and shows one calm, dismissible note after a long stretch. It resets after 30 minutes away from YouTube. YOUR TIME: a running total, daily average, today's time, and a 7-day chart, visible right in the popup. BUILT TO KEEP WORKING: YouTube changes its layout often enough to break browser extensions. Every hideable element shows a live status dot (working / not found / broken selector), and if one does break before an update ships, you can paste in a replacement CSS selector yourself from the same popu. PRIVACY: no accounts, no ads, no analytics, no external servers of any kind. Your on/off settings sync across your own signed-in Chrome browsers using Chrome's built-in sync storage (the same mechanism Chrome uses for your bookmarks), this extension's developer never sees that data. Your watch-time history is stored only locally on your device and never leaves it.