YouTube Plus for Firefox and Chrome

YouTube Plus is a free add-on for the Firefox and Google Chrome web browser that provides you with dozens of configuration options to improve your YouTube experience.

Additionally, it is also available as a userscript for you to install in other web browsers that support these scripts.

If you spend enough time on YouTube watching videos, you may have encountered your fair share of issues on the site.

Maybe it is a new layout of the site or part of the site, the inability to properly blacklist publishers from being recommended to you, or the share panel that is displayed when video ends.

While you may resolve some issues directly on YouTube, like the autoplay of videos, there is no option for others.

YouTube Plus

The add-on YouTube Plus ships with dozens of preferences that change minor and core features on YouTube.

Some are enabled automatically after installation of the add-on in the browser, while others need to be enabled on the settings page.

It is probably a good idea to go through the settings right after installation to adjust them based on your needs.

This is done with a click on the YouTube Plus icon on YouTube. The settings are divided into general, video and blacklist, and it may take at least a couple of minutes to go through all of them.

Good news is that you find a question mark icon displayed next to each preference when you hover the mouse over one that leads to a help page explaining the feature. That's useful for features that are not clear directly what they do (disable SPF for instance referring to Structured Page Fragments which limits what is loaded when you switch between pages on the site).

Since it would go too far to list all of them on this page, here is a short selection of important features the browser extension supports:

• Enable subscription playlist.
• Enable infinite scroll in feeds.
• Enable pop-out mode and make the video player always visible even while scrolling.
• Set default channel.
• Enable grid layout in subscriptions and search results.
• Disable hovercards.
• Enable video ads only in videos from subscribed channels.
• Disable annotations, subtitles and CC.
• Remember audio volume, change volume with mouse wheel, and disable YouTube loudness normalisation.
• Blacklist channels
• Disable DASH, and HFR.

There is more to the extension than those options listed above. Blacklisting is particularly useful as it takes care of any mention of the channel on the site. So, if you dislike a particular channel, or find constant references to it annoying, this is the option to make sure that you won't see a single video thumbnail by that channel again on YouTube.

Another interesting feature is the option to change the layout of search results or subscriptions to a grid layout. Google changed the layout recently making it highly inefficient on larger screens as only a few video thumbnails are displayed on each page without scrolling.

Grid layout aligns video thumbnails next to each other to fit more than four times as many videos on a single page without scrolling, provided the window width is large enough for that of course.

Check out the feature overview on the extension's GitHub page if you are interested in all features supported by the extension or userscript.

Closing Words

YouTube Plus provides you with options to personalize the experience on YouTube. It resolves some existing usability issues on the video site and is without doubt one of the best extensions available for that currently.

Now You: Which YouTube features annoy you?