Browser Bits
YouTube Enhancer - Focus, Speed & Quality Control icon

YouTube Enhancer - Focus, Speed & Quality Control

Enhance YouTube with focus mode, playback controls, Shorts hiding, quality lock, and custom themes.

Works on
Edge
Version
3.0.2
Add to Edge

You open YouTube for one video and leave twenty minutes later having watched four others. The popup gives you a switch for each thing that does that: the home feed, the Shorts shelves, the sidebar recommendations, the comments under the player.

YouTube Enhancer gives you full control over your YouTube experience with a clean popup interface.

Focus:

Playback:

Appearance:

Screenshots

What it does

  • Hide Related Videos

    remove sidebar recommendations on watch pages

  • Hide Shorts

    remove Shorts from feed, sidebar, and navigation

  • Focus Mode

    hide comments, recommendations, end screens, and more for distraction-free viewing

  • Auto-Pause on Tab Switch

    automatically pause video when you switch tabs

  • Disable Autoplay

    prevent the next video from playing automatically

  • Playback Speed

    set a default speed (1x, 1.25x, 1.5x, 1.75x, 2x) for all videos

  • Quality Lock

    force your preferred video quality (Auto, 4K, 1440p, 1080p, 720p, 480p)

  • Custom Theme

    apply a custom color theme to YouTube

  • All settings sync across devices via Chrome storage

  • Toggle any feature on/off instantly from the popup

  • Lightweight content script

    only runs on YouTube

  • No data collection, no analytics, no accounts required

  • Available in English and Korean

When you'd reach for it

  • Watching one video and actually stopping there

    Turn on Hide Related Videos and the sidebar of suggestions next to the player disappears, which also widens the video. Focus Mode goes further and hides comments, the description, end screens, and the card teasers that pop up over the last seconds. Disable Autoplay switches YouTube's autoplay toggle back off and keeps it off when the page tries to re-enable it.

  • Lectures, talks and tutorials at a fixed speed

    Pick 1x, 1.25x, 1.5x, 1.75x or 2x once and every video starts at that rate, including after you click through to the next one. If the player resets the rate mid-video, the setting is applied again. Auto-Pause on Tab Switch stops playback when you move to another tab and resumes it when you come back, so you don't lose your place while checking something.

  • Keeping Shorts and the home feed out of sight

    Hide Shorts removes Shorts shelves from the home page and search results, the Shorts entry in the left sidebar, and the Shorts tab on channel pages. Hide Feed empties the home page recommendation grid, so opening youtube.com gives you a search box instead of a wall of thumbnails. Both are toggles, so you can turn them back on for an evening of browsing.

Permissions & privacy

Single purpose

YouTube Enhancer provides a popup with toggles to customize the YouTube viewing experience: hide distractions (related videos, Shorts, comments), control playback (auto-pause, speed, autoplay), lock video quality, and apply custom themes.

storageSaves your settings and data in the browser's own storage, on this device.

All settings stored locally in chrome.storage No external servers or API calls Only accesses youtube.com pages It runs only the code shipped inside the package — no remote code is fetched.

Questions people ask

How do I hide Shorts on YouTube in Chrome?

Open the popup and switch on Hide Shorts under the Focus section. It hides the Shorts shelves in the home feed and search results, the Shorts link in the left navigation, the Shorts tab on channel pages, and Shorts links that appear among sidebar recommendations. The change takes effect on open YouTube tabs without a reload.

Can I make every video play at 1.5x automatically?

Yes. Turn on Playback Speed and choose one of 1x, 1.25x, 1.5x, 1.75x or 2x. The chosen rate is applied when a video loads and re-applied when YouTube's own player changes it, including after in-page navigation to another video. Turning the toggle off leaves the speed control back in YouTube's hands.

Can it stop YouTube from dropping my video quality?

Quality Lock asks the player for the level you pick — Auto, 4K, 1440p, 1080p, 720p, 480p or 360p — each time a video starts and after you navigate to another one. If the video was never encoded at that resolution, the player falls back to a level it reports as available. It requests a quality from the standard player controls rather than changing how the video is streamed.

Does it block ads?

No. It hides specific sections of YouTube's own page layout — recommendations, Shorts, comments, description, end screens — and does not touch ads or the video stream. There is no downloader and no sponsor-skipping. If ad blocking is what you are after, this is not the tool for it.

What permissions does it use and can it see my other tabs?

The manifest declares one permission, storage, and no host permissions. The content script is limited to https://www.youtube.com/*, so it is not loaded on any other site and there is nothing for it to read elsewhere. Your toggles are kept in chrome.storage.sync, which means the browser itself can carry them to other devices signed into the same profile.

Related extensions

More in: Productivity