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YouTube Detox icon

YouTube Detox

Removes recommended videos from YouTube homepage and video pages.

Users
47
Works on
Chrome · Firefox
Version
3.0.2
Add to ChromeAdd to Firefox

You open YouTube for one specific video and leave forty minutes later having watched six others. The homepage grid is what does that. This clears the grid away and hides the column of suggestions that sits beside the player while you watch.

YouTube Detox helps you reclaim your time and stay focused by removing distracting suggested videos from the YouTube homepage and video watch pages. Watch what you came for — without the endless rabbit hole of recommendations.

Screenshots

What it does

  • Cleaner Homepage

    Removes the wall of recommended videos from the YouTube homepage so it no longer pulls you in.

  • Focused Watch Page

    Hides suggested and related videos next to the player so you can watch without temptation.

  • Fewer Distractions

    Cut down on autoplay-driven binge watching and reclaim your attention.

  • Toggle On / Off

    Turn the extension on or off anytime from the popup.

  • Lightweight

    Runs only on YouTube and stores nothing about you.

When you'd reach for it

  • Going to YouTube for one specific thing

    Paste a link, use the search box, or open your Subscriptions and everything behaves normally. Only two surfaces change: the browse grid you land on at youtube.com, and the suggested-videos rail on watch pages. Nothing is blocked, so you never have to fight a block screen to get to the video you meant to watch.

  • The homepage that used to greet you with thirty thumbnails

    Instead of an empty page, the feed area is replaced with a single line of large text — a rotating quote picked at random on each load. It reads your browser language and pulls from Korean, English, Japanese or Chinese sets, so it is not a wall of English on a Korean machine.

  • Following a tutorial without the sidebar tugging at you

    On a watch page the right-hand list of related videos is hidden, so the player, title, description and comments are all that remain in view. The video itself, the controls and playback behaviour are untouched — only the recommendation rail is removed from the layout.

How to use it

  1. 01Install YouTube Detox.
  2. 02Open YouTube — the recommended-video sections are removed automatically.
  3. 03Use the popup to toggle the extension on or off whenever you like.

Permissions & privacy

Single purpose

YouTube Detox has a single purpose: to remove distracting suggested and recommended videos from the YouTube homepage and video watch pages so users can stay focused. A content script on youtube.com hides the recommendation sections, and users can toggle the behavior on or off. No data leaves the user's device.

storageYouTube Detox uses the storage permission to save the user's preferences — such as the on/off toggle and which sections to hide — locally using chrome.storage.local. This ensures the user's chosen configuration persists across browser sessions and is applied consistently every time they open YouTube. All data is stored locally and is never transmitted to any external server.
webNavigationYouTube Detox uses the webNavigation permission to detect YouTube's in-page navigation. YouTube is a single-page application that swaps between the homepage, search results, and watch pages via the History API without a full page reload, so a content script injected once would not re-run when the user moves between these views. By listening for URL change events on YouTube tabs, the extension knows when the view has changed and can immediately re-apply its rules to hide recommended videos on the newly displayed page. The permission is used strictly to observe navigation events so the hiding rules stay applied — no navigation history, watch history, or URLs are collected, stored, or transmitted.
tabsCan see the titles and addresses of your open tabs.

YouTube Detox runs only on YouTube. Your on/off preference is stored locally. No browsing history, watch history, or personal data is collected, stored, or transmitted. It runs only the code shipped inside the package — no remote code is fetched.

Questions people ask

How do I hide recommended videos on YouTube in Chrome?

Install it and open YouTube. The homepage feed is cleared and the suggested-videos column on watch pages is hidden straight away, with no setup step. It reapplies itself as you click between pages, because YouTube swaps views without a full page reload and the extension listens for that.

Does it break search, subscriptions or playlists?

No. It touches exactly two things: the browse container on the youtube.com homepage, and the watch-next results element on a watch page. Search results, the Subscriptions feed, channel pages, playlists, History and Watch Later are all left as YouTube renders them.

Why is there a quote on my YouTube homepage?

That is the replacement for the feed. Rather than leaving a blank rectangle, the homepage container gets a single randomly chosen quote in large type, redrawn each time you load the page. The set it draws from follows your browser language across Korean, English, Japanese and Chinese.

Can I switch it off from the popup when I do want recommendations?

Not reliably in this build, version 3.0.2. The popup shows an on/off control and writes your choice to local storage, but the script that hides the feed does not read that value, so flipping it to off will not bring the grid back. To see the normal homepage again, disable the extension from chrome://extensions.

Can it see my watch history or what I search for?

No. Its content script is registered for https://www.youtube.com/* only, and all it does is tag the page as home, watch or other so a stylesheet can hide elements. It never reads video titles, search terms or history. The manifest declares storage, webNavigation and tabs; the single stored value is the popup's on/off flag, kept in chrome.storage.local on your own machine.

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