Tubeless — YouTube without the noise by rwkaspar

You open YouTube to watch one specific video. Forty minutes later you are three recommendations and two Shorts deep and no longer sure what the plan was.

Tubeless takes the hook out of YouTube's hand. What is left is the video.

WHAT GOES AWAY

Home and feeds
• The recommendation feed on the home page — a calm placeholder instead
• Shorts: shelves, grid tiles, menu entry
• Filter chips, Trending and Explore
• Promoted videos and ad placements

Watch page
• The entire right-hand column with "Up next"
• Comments and live chat
• Like, share, save
• Merch, tickets, donation prompts
• Playlist panel

Player
• End cards and the video wall at the end
• The "More videos" overlay when you pause
• Info cards, heatmap, next button, miniplayer
• Autoplay — off for good, not just for this session
• Ads get skipped the moment they become skippable

Header and navigation
• The whole top bar, the sidebar, the bell, the counter badge

HOW YOU TUNE IT

42 filters, each one switchable on its own, plus three presets:

• Custom — your saved selection, one click away at any time
• Focus — the header and search bar stay, sponsor segments and intros get marked and skipped
• Filter nothing — everything back on

Put together exactly what you want gone, save it once as "Custom" — and get back to it with a single click after any detour through the other presets.

A switch at the top of the popup pauses Tubeless entirely, for when you do feel like browsing. Changes apply immediately, without a reload, in every open tab.

By default the header is gone, and with it YouTube's search field — that is where the pull usually starts again. You search from the field in the popup. If you would rather keep the header, pick the "Focus" preset.

WHAT YOU CAN RELY ON

• Nothing is fetched, measured or transmitted. No analytics, no accounts, no
external servers.
• The only permissions are "storage" for your settings and access to
youtube.com. Nothing else.
• Your settings live in your Chrome profile and travel with Chrome Sync.
• The source is open and readable: github.com/rwkaspar/tubeless

ABOUT ADS, HONESTLY

Tubeless skips ads, it does not block them. The moment the "Skip" button shows up it gets pressed; unskippable ads are fast-forwarded. That saves you the wait and the clicks — it does not make YouTube ad-free, and Tubeless is no replacement for an ad blocker.

SPONSOR SEGMENTS (SPONSORBLOCK)

Sponsorships baked into the video by creators can, on request, be marked green in the progress bar and skipped automatically — intros included on request, with a brief notice after every jump. All three switches are OFF out of the box. Only when you enable them does Tubeless query the SponsorBlock community database (optionally for intros too) — anonymized: only a 4-character hash prefix is transmitted, never the video ID. Switched off means: no requests at all.

Dislike counts are deliberately not shown. They would only be available through a third party that would need the video ID for every video you watch. That does not square with the promise above.

Twelve languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish and Chinese. The language follows your browser settings.