Optube

✨ Make YouTube distraction‑free

Tired of getting pulled into Shorts, endless recommendations, or a noisy sidebar when you just wanted to watch one video? Optube helps you focus by letting you hide the parts of YouTube that doesn't serve you.

No account needed, and you can switch things on & off anytime.

What you can hide:

• 🎞️ Shorts across YouTube
• 💬 Comments and commenter avatars
• 🧩 Recommended (“Up next”) panels
• 🏠 Home and Subscriptions feeds (or just parts, like the sidebar subscription list)
• 📚 Sidebar sections like Explore, History, Playlists, and more
• 🏷️ Badges, chips, watched progress bars, and hover previews
• 🔍 Top bar clutter: Search, Notifications, Create button
• 🤖 AI summary, category/topic rows, and community posts

Why it helps:

• ⏱️ Cut distractions and save time
• 🧹 Keep your homepage clean
• 🙌 Watch with fewer interruptions
• 🎓 Customise YouTube to match how you use it (study, music, tutorials, etc.)

How it works:
• ⚙️ Simple toggles in the extension popup to turn features on/off instantly
• 👀 Changes are visual only (it doesn't delete your data or affect your account)
• 🌐 Works across all pages
• 🚫 No tracking, no sign‑up, just works out of the box.
• ☁️ Settings are stored with Chrome Sync so they follow through to your other desktop environments should you have more than one PC/Laptop.

Bonus:

🎥 Cinema mode
• Cinema mode is a cinematic like experience, this applies changes to the home page layout, by showing a carousel of recommended videos, and a spotlight at the top, that rotates through random recommendations to give a short preview with an easy button to jump straight to that video.

Future plans for this features:

• Apply the same layout on subscriptions page
• Create for a more cinematic experience when watching videos
• Mobile view support (this feature only works best from medium sized screens and upwards such as laptop, desktop)

🚀 Get started
• 1️⃣ Install Optube
• 2️⃣ Open YouTube
• 3️⃣ Click the Optube icon and choose what to hide, changes apply immediately.

📝 Note
Optube isn’t an ad blocker and doesn’t remove creators’ content; it hides on‑page UI elements you choose. This extension WILL still work if you already use another extension that uses ad blocker.

🧑‍💻Support
If there are any feature requests, or bugs, please email [email protected] and place the relevant subject (BUG, FEATURE).