LearnTube

A calmer YouTube for learning: one switch hides Shorts and clutter, and turns Subscriptions into a quiet inbox.

LearnTube turns YouTube into a calm place to learn. It's a single on/off switch that reshapes the pages you already use — without changing your account, your subscriptions, or anything on YouTube's side. Turn it on to reclaim the page; turn it off to get plain YouTube back instantly. ONE MASTER SWITCH Click the LearnTube icon to flip everything on or off. There's nothing to configure to get started — on by default, off whenever you want the normal site back. The switch is the whole popup; the rest of the controls live right on the pages, where you use them. FEWER DISTRACTIONS, SITE-WIDE With LearnTube on, the pieces of YouTube that pull you away from what you came for are hidden: - Shorts — the shelves, the tiles, the sidebar entry, and the /shorts/ player itself (open a Short and you land back on a normal page). - The "up next" suggestion rail, comments, and end-screen cards on the watch page. - The masthead is trimmed to the essentials — search and your account — with the Create button and the notification bell tucked away. SUBSCRIPTIONS AS A QUIET INBOX Your Subscriptions page becomes a compact, text-first list: channel name on top, video title below, like an inbox. Videos you've already opened dim down so you can see what's new at a glance. You can give channels a private star rating (one to five) and flip on a top-rated view that shows just your highest-rated channels (four and five stars) — it only changes what you see, never YouTube's recommendations. A quiet menu on each row lets you save a video into one of your topics or archive it out of the list. A LEARNING HOME, BUILT BY YOU The home feed's recommendation wall is replaced by your Library — a place you fill with the YouTube playlists you're actually working through. Paste a playlist link to add a topic, and LearnTube reads each video's resume bar to show how far along you are: a progress bar per topic, a "Continue" row that points at your next lecture, and a course view that lays a playlist out as a tidy checklist of lectures with their real titles and lengths. On any watch page the player is centered and the suggestions column is hidden; open a lecture that belongs to one of your topics and a small focus strip appears too — a link back to the topic, where you are ("Lecture 3 of 12"), a playback-speed control, and a link to the next lecture. Search ("Find") gets an optional "Lectures" lens that hides clips under three minutes so longer talks and courses stand out. PRIVACY LearnTube stores its settings — your on/off state, your topics and playlists, your star ratings, and which videos you've watched or archived — in your own browser, using Chrome's storage. It sends nothing anywhere: no analytics, no tracking, no servers, no accounts. The extension only ever touches YouTube pages, and nothing it learns about your viewing leaves your browser. (Items saved with Chrome's synced storage ride along with your normal Chrome sign-in sync, under your control; the developer never receives any of it.) AN HONEST NOTE LearnTube is a CSS-first reskin: it works by restyling and hiding YouTube's own page elements rather than rebuilding them. That keeps it light and fast, but it also means a YouTube layout change can make part of it stop working until it's updated. If something looks broken, please report it so it can be fixed. WHAT IT DOESN'T DO It doesn't block ads or download videos, and it doesn't work in the YouTube mobile app — it's for YouTube in a desktop Chromium browser (Chrome, Edge, Brave, and similar). LearnTube is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by YouTube or Google.