Better Browsing – Gain Complete Control over YouTube with YouTube Options
Wednesday, September 14, 2011 by Deryck Wong 
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If you’re like most college students, you’ve probably seen a video or two (or hundreds!) on YouTube. While we all know and love this great site for providing us with classics like Charlie bit my finger and David After Dentist, don’t you ever wish you could get rid of all the crap on YouTube and put the emphasis back on the great videos? If you browse YouTube with Chrome, now you can thanks to YouTube Options, a free extension (sorry Firefox users, but I wasn’t able to find an equivalent for Mozilla’s browser).
Download YouTube Options here and find out more about it here. YouTube Options allows you to do a myriad of things that makes browsing YouTube (or any of the other sites it supports, including Vimeo, Funny or Die, and Hulu) much, much better.
Video Options
- If you hate those annoying in-video ads and annotations like I do, simply block them all with YouTube Options. It’s so wonderfully refreshing to not have to click on little boxes in videos anymore to make them go away!
- Set default viewing size and viewing quality so you no longer have to adjust them manually. Just sit back and enjoy your videos in your favorite resolution every time!
- Hate auto-play? Disable it with YouTube Options and press play on your own terms.
Layout Options
YouTube Options includes a great box to the left of this feature showing exactly which parts of the YouTube UX will be shown per your preferences. Hate comments? Hide them! For a really minimalist interface, you can even hide everything but the video and matte the background if you so desire. This is definitely my favorite part of YouTube Options: eliminate all distractions and only keep the content you want to see.
Extra Functionality
Unfortunately, the Chrome Web Store Developer Agreement prevents the creator of YouTube Options from including another feature - saving all available resolutions and versions of a video. If you want to unlock that ability, download the full version of YouTube Options here. Finally, keep in mind that like most of the software I use, YouTube Options is absolutely free! Give it a shot, and I promise you’ll never go back to browsing YouTube without it.
Do you know of any other YouTube or video site hacks? Let us know in the comments!
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