General
What does YT Focus do?
YT Focus strips YouTube's engagement-driven UI. It rewrites Shorts to play as normal videos in the horizontal player, hides the home recommendation grid, removes the watch-page sidebar and end-screen overlays, and redirects youtube.com to your Subscriptions feed. Everything is toggleable from the popup.
Does it collect any data?
No. YT Focus runs entirely locally. It stores your toggle preferences in chrome.storage.sync (Chrome's built-in extension storage tied to your Google account) and makes no external network requests. There are no analytics, no tracking, and no accounts.
Why does it need "Read and change data on youtube.com"?
The extension injects CSS and a small content script into YouTube pages to hide elements and rewrite Shorts links. This is the standard Chrome extension permission for modifying a specific website's content. It only runs on youtube.com and has no access to any other site or your browsing history.
Can I still watch Shorts if I want to?
Yes. Channel Shorts tabs are visible and fully accessible. The extension removes the algorithmic Shorts shelf from search results, but any Short you encounter is rewritten to play in the normal video player, so you can still watch them — just without the vertical infinite-scroll feed.
Troubleshooting
Changes aren't showing up on YouTube.
After installing or updating, go to chrome://extensions, click the refresh icon on YT Focus, then hard-reload YouTube with Ctrl + Shift + R. YouTube is a single-page app, so a regular reload sometimes isn't enough.
The popup toggles aren't responding.
Try removing and re-adding the extension. If using the unpacked version, make sure you're loading the correct folder from chrome://extensions with Developer Mode enabled. Check the browser console for any errors by right-clicking the popup and selecting "Inspect".
Some Shorts are still showing in search.
YouTube occasionally changes its internal DOM structure. If you see Shorts leaking through, please open a GitHub issue with a screenshot and the output of Inspect Element on the Shorts shelf — the element tag name is what I need to update the selectors.
The sidebar reappears in theater mode.
The sidebar hide is scoped to the default view. In theater and fullscreen modes, YouTube handles the sidebar differently, and the extension doesn't interfere to avoid breaking the layout.
Does it work with other YouTube extensions?
YT Focus is designed to coexist with other extensions. If you use an extension like Adycus that also handles Shorts redirects, you can safely keep both — YT Focus rewrites Shorts links before navigation so the other extension's redirect never fires, avoiding double-loads.