Focus Tube – Block YouTube Shorts

Blocks YouTube Shorts, Mixes, and channels you choose. Tracks your watch time by category. Distraction-free, private, and free.

Focus Tube is a YouTube Shorts blocker built for focus and digital wellbeing. It removes Shorts, Mixes, autoplay, and other engagement hooks from every surface of YouTube — Home, Search, Subscriptions, History, and channel pages — for a distraction-free, productivity- friendly viewing experience. Watch what you came to watch, then leave. Unofficial and independent — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by YouTube or Google. WHAT IT BLOCKS • The Shorts player — opening a /shorts/ link redirects to the normal watch page or straight home, your choice. • Shorts shelves — the horizontal carousel on Home and Subscriptions. • Shorts in search — the shelf and filter chip on search results. • Loose Shorts — individual Shorts cards anywhere they appear: feeds, History, channel pages, up-next. • Shorts links — the sidebar entry, filter chip, and channel tab. • Mixes — YouTube's auto-generated "Mixes for you" radio playlists. • Autoplay — turns off the autoplay toggle on watch pages and removes it from the player controls. • Calm Mode — mutes YouTube's red urgency accents (including the YouTube logo itself) to a neutral color, hides the unread-notification badge, softly blurs and warps thumbnails to take the edge off clickbait imagery (hover to see one clearly), and stops thumbnail hover-preview autoplay. • Keywords — hide any video by title, channel name, or description text you choose, with an optional whole-word-only match mode. • Watch Stats — a pie chart of how many minutes you watch per YouTube category (Education, Entertainment, Autos & Vehicles, Howto & Style, and so on — YouTube's own official metadata), plus a "last watched" card. Runs continuously and stays on your device; there's no in-app toggle to disable it or reset the data. WHY Shorts, autoplay, and red urgency badges are deliberate engagement mechanics, not neutral defaults. Focus Tube turns them off so YouTube behaves like a tool you use on purpose instead of a feed that pulls you back in. PRIVATE BY DESIGN Focus Tube talks to no third party and no server it controls — nothing is ever sent anywhere, and there's no account or analytics. Watch Stats reads each video's official YouTube category and tracks watch time entirely on-device (chrome.storage.local); it's never transmitted. Reading that category occasionally involves a same-origin request back to youtube.com itself — never a third party — to pick up a newly-opened video's metadata; see the privacy policy for details. Your settings sync only through your browser's own built-in extension sync — the same mechanism it uses for your other extensions — never through any server Focus Tube controls, because it doesn't have one. Full privacy policy: https://github.com/bommireddy30/focus-tube/blob/main/PRIVACY.md FREE Every feature above is free, with no daily cap, no tiers, and no license key. OPEN SOURCE https://github.com/bommireddy30/focus-tube