🎬 YouTube Advanced Filter (v2)

A browser extension that gives you granular control over YouTube’s interface and video filtering.

This project is open-source and not monetized.
It exists to make YouTube more controllable and less distracting.

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🧭 Overview

This extension does two things:

1. 🎯 Filters videos by title, channel, and upload date
2. 🧱 Hides specific YouTube UI elements at the DOM level

It works on:

• Home
• Search
• Subscriptions
• Watch pages

The extension operates purely on the DOM after the page loads.
It does not intercept network requests or modify YouTube APIs.

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🔎 Features

🎥 Content Filtering

• Title allowlist
• Title blocklist
• Channel allowlist
• Channel blocklist
• Optional regex support
• Optional whole-word matching
• Date filtering (Today / Week / Month / Year)
• Soft hide (blur + disable interaction)
• Hard hide (display: none)

Filtering applies to:

• Standard videos
• Sidebar recommendations
• Search results
• Channel cards and shelves

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🧩 UI Controls

🔴 Core

• Hide Shorts
• Hide homepage feed
• Hide comments

🟢 Feed Controls

• Hide sponsored cards
• Hide playlist cards
• Hide members-only videos
• Hide mix/radio playlists
• Hide subscription section
• Hide subscription buttons

🟣 Watch Page

• Hide recommended sidebar
• Hide live chat
• Hide playlist panel
• Hide end cards overlays
• Disable autoplay

⚙️ Navigation

• Hide top header
• Hide notification bell
• Hide Explore section
• Hide “More from YouTube”
• Hide “You” section

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🏗️ Design Choices

🎨 CSS-first hiding

Where possible, UI elements are hidden using injected CSS instead of JavaScript.
This reduces MutationObserver overhead and improves performance.

Shorts are handled entirely via CSS to avoid re-entrant observer loops.

🚫 No network interception

This extension does not block requests or modify YouTube responses.
All filtering is DOM-based after content renders.

🔁 Observer guard

MutationObserver is protected against feedback loops to prevent excessive re-filtering when elements are hidden.

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⚠️ Limitations

• Does not work on the YouTube mobile app
• Does not modify embedded videos
• Cannot remove content baked into the video itself (e.g., sponsor segments inside the video)
• Relies on YouTube’s DOM structure, so UI changes may temporarily break selectors
• Date filtering depends on relative timestamp parsing and may not cover every edge case

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🔐 Permissions

• storage – to save settings
• https://www.youtube.com/* – to modify the DOM

No analytics. No tracking. No data collection.

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🛠️ Installation (Manual)

1. Clone or download this repository
2. Open chrome://extensions
3. Enable Developer Mode
4. Click “Load unpacked”
5. Select the extension folder

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🚀 Version

v2.0 – Major rewrite:

• Expanded UI controls
• Improved filtering engine
• CSS-first hiding strategy
• Observer loop protection