YouTube, quieter.
Tubeless is a small extension for Firefox and Chrome that hides the parts of YouTube you’d rather not see. Shorts, ads, recommendation shelves, end-screen cards, comments: each one has its own switch, and one more brings plain YouTube back.
Without Tubeless
With Tubeless
What it can hide
Every switch works on its own. Sensible ones are on from the start, and the rest are a click away in the toolbar popup.
- Sidebar
- Shorts, Explore (Trending, Music, Gaming and the rest), “More from YouTube”, and the “You” section, which can be full, minimal or hidden
- Top bar
- The Create button, the notifications bell, filter chips
- Feeds
- On Home, Subscriptions and search results: every shelf, or just the gaming ones; event, alert and promo banners; feed nudges; and whole kinds of video, from Shorts and Mixes to live streams, music videos, movies and shows, community posts, playlists and podcasts, member-only videos and Premieres. Channel pages are never filtered.
- Watch page
- The merch shelf, live chat, the fundraiser shelf, end-screen cards, the description, comments, the recommendations sidebar, Wikipedia and context panels, and a minimal row of action buttons
- AI
- Video summaries, “Ask questions”, Ask YouTube in the search bar, and custom feed prompts
- Ads
- Sponsored slots, display and companion ads, brand shelves, Premium upsells and the ad overlays on the player. This only hides them from the page: an ad that plays inside the video still plays.
- Popups
- Survey prompts like “Which Premium features are you aware of?”
How it works
Tubeless adds one stylesheet to youtube.com. Each switch you turn on puts a rule in it that hides one part of the page:
<style>
/* one rule for each switch that’s on */
[the part you switched off] {
display: none;
}
</style>Nothing on the page is rewritten, nothing sits watching it, and no code is fetched from anywhere. When YouTube moves things around, the fix is usually a line in utils/selectors.ts, where every selector is marked ✓ stable, ? likely current, or ! a guess.
Privacy
No telemetry, no analytics, no tracking, no network requests. Tubeless only runs on youtube.com, and the one other permission it asks for is storage, so your switches follow you through your own browser’s sync and go nowhere else.
Why I made it
I’ve been a YouTube Premium subscriber for many years. Despite this, my YouTube feed was still cluttered with things I didn’t want to see. Shorts all over the place, “Most relevant” sections, “Explore more topics” sections, “How are we doing?” survey blocks, more Shorts, the list goes on.
I tried numerous other extensions. Most helped, but none of them got rid of all of it, so I created Tubeless to solve the problem. I’ve been using it full time for many months with extensive YouTube browsing, and I’m constantly tweaking it.
- Steve