Like most of us, I have a love/hate relationship with YouTube. It clearly takes far too much of my time. However, there is also a bunch of people I respect who publish video-essays and deep-dives (code-, research- and writing-related), and that is the only place to hear them talk. Also, there are the videos your family really needs you to watch or the sky will come crashing down. So, I end up manually activating dirty CSS injections on several devices and across multiple web browsers just to block suggestions, shorts, the “For You” section, comments, etc. to make sure I do not fall into the rabbit hole, having watched the thing I actually cared about.

I have always known it was a silly approach, after all there are so many standalone applications, online services, browser extensions and whatnot to make my life easier. But that’s the thing — there’s so many of them, and the great majority paid or freemium. Some of them even subscription-based, as ridiculous as it sounds. Comparing, choosing and setting them up was so much work.

As any self-respecting software developer would do, finally I got fed up and decided to spend 10 times more time writing my own extension so everyone can just get it for free and move on with their lives. This time, though, I did a slightly more thorough search and stumbled upon the best possible result: in the meantime, someone else did the work for me. Here it comes, completely free and checking all the boxes:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/focus-for-youtube/id1514703160?mt=12.

The only downside: it is only for Safari. But who knows, maybe that will motivate more people to stop feeding Chrome their personal data.

If you are looking for a free, private Webkit-based browser alternative to Safari, take a peek at Orion: https://kagi.com/orion/ . It can run Chrome and Firefox plugins as well.

UPDATE 05-09-2025: I just found out about the amazing world of alternative open-source interfaces to commercial products like Youtube or Reddit. It’s quite incredible, and worth checking out if you are looking for even less bothering and more anonymization. For youtube: https://docs.invidious.io/instances/

Update 10-09-2025: Or if you love the terminal, you can just play any youtube link without even visiting their website by using mpv:

mpv --options link

Update 08-02-2026: For terminal lovers, try yt-x for the full CLI-based youtube browsing experience: https://github.com/Benexl/yt-x. Finally, check out GrayJay for a more author-centric approach to video essays: https://grayjay.app.