Why doesn't the extension personalize my YouTube experience?

Currently the YouTube Data API provided by Google is fairly restrictive in its scope and as such, no part of it has been used here. Since the extension works entirely on your local machine, it can't modify search results served from YouTube's backend. In simple words, the results "personalized" by the algorithm for you are still served in the search page and recommended sections.

How does this work?

There are a lot of engagement sections integrated within the search results to get you to engage more with the platform. This is a business decision and sometimes it works great! When it does, it serves you new and interesting videos to explore. However, when it doesn't, these recommendation-blocks act as a barrier between your search query and the actual results you set out to find.

This addon gives you additional flexibility to automatically prune THESE extra suggestions.

Is the extension slowing down YouTube for me?

Probably not. But I understand your frustration. YouTube being slow and sluggish, especially on Firefox has been reported all over the web. It is a known issue and I'm pretty sure engineers on both sides are working to have it fixed as soon as they can. The recent update of this extension was designed to improve performance by only loading it on the search page using mutationobservers. This ensures that the extension remains idle and consumes low system resources when not in use. If you still experience slowdowns, please update to the latest version. Here are a few other steps that might help.

I currently use a ~10 year old laptop and YouTube has never slowed down for me using the extension. If I can't reproduce the problem, I can't fix it. Remember, this software is free and open-source. While I do my best to address reported issues, I rely on user feedback like yours to improve the experience for everyone. If the extension doesn't meet your needs, you're always welcome to uninstall it and explore other options.

What do search filters hide?

Hide Related results and Horizontal Card List Suggestions - remove automatically-generated suggestions like "People also search for", For you", "Explore Creators", "Searches related to", "Learn while you're at home", "Related to your search", "People also watched" etc.

Hide Shorts - removes shorts from clouding your search results.

Hide Live Videos - removes live videos and premieres from your search results.

Hide Playlists - removes all playlists from appearing in your search results. Be mindful while looking only for playlists with YouTube's default search filters. If you tick this option, there might be a blank page altogether.

Hide Channel Listing - removes any channels from clouding your search results.

Hide Shorts Panel - makes sure you don't see shorts carousel in the search page. Please note that this doesn't remove individual shorts, but the entire horizontal pane that sometimes pops up!

Hide YouTube Mixes - prunes those auto-generated mixes from the search results.

What do various UI changes mean?

Center the Title - Centers the title of the playing video. Tested and works on Google Chrome 109.0/Firefox 104.0 and above. It will work for you if YouTube is serving you the new interface.

Center the Description - Center aligns the text of the description on videos.

Result Spotlight - As the name says, highlights the videos in search results.

Highlight Selected Tab - On the home page, it highlights the current selected tab on the left hand side (subscriptions, explore, etc). The little topic bubbles at the top of the page too change color on hover. Just another visual clue to aid your browsing.

#All these toggles are completely optional and you can turn them off at any time.


Bonus Feature?

If you tick the Redirect Shorts to Legacy Video Page option, all shorts you click will get redirected to the "normal" video page version. This feature is for those who dislike the tiktok-like interface on desktop but still want to check out a 10 second clip! No need for extra scripts or extensions.

Local Counter

There's also a completely local counter that tells you the number of sections Search Fixer removed for you so far! It remains on your system and never leaves it. Nobody; not even the developer knows about it.

You are, however, free to screenshot and share it with the world. In fact, I encourage it! I would love to see it.

That's it, if you see anything breaking in this context, send me a message through gitlab. Please feel free to leave a nice review too! :D