v2.0.0 Customizability

TL;DR

Dumbify 2.0 is a ground-up redesign, and this is the beta. 19 themes and wallpapers (GIFs and video loops included). Your 1.x settings carry over. Expect some rough edges, and please open an issue when you hit one. We would really appreciate feedback to help us make fixes, and continue building Dumbify!

What's new:

• New reading view: a sidebar (full, icons only or hidden), a top bar with search and a ••• page menu, and feeds as a List, Cards or a dense Table.
• Watch page layouts: Classic, Theater, or Split, which puts comments and the playlist beside the video.
• 19 themes: 8 light and 11 dark, all tested for contrast. Pick one for each mode and let Auto follow your system. There are accent colours too, including one taken from your wallpaper.
• Looks: six one-click starting points (Paper, Library, Aurora, Terminal, Sunset, Notebook), with Undo.
• Wallpapers: upload an image, an animated GIF/WebP/APNG or an MP4/WebM loop, or pick a built-in gradient, pattern or moving one. Your last six uploads stay in a gallery.
• Panels: solid, frosted glass or clear over the wallpaper, and text adjusts so it stays readable.
• New settings page with a live preview, quick controls in the toolbar popup, and settings export/import.
• New shortcuts: Ctrl/⌘ \ shows or hides the sidebar, and Ctrl/⌘ Shift L switches between light and dark.
• Fixes: dark themes no longer flash light on load, your font now applies to titles, quick changes in settings no longer overwrite each other, and short feeds keep loading.
• One new permission: unlimitedStorage, so large animated wallpapers fit. Chrome shows no warning for it, and nothing leaves your browser.

Happy surfing! ❤️

v1.1.0 - an off switch, and Shorts out of the way

Dumbify v1.1.0

A calm, text-first YouTube.

An off switch you can reach, Shorts that stop taking up space in your history, and links
that behave like links.

New

An On/Off switch in the toolbar popup. Turning the reading view off used to mean
disabling the whole extension from chrome://extensions. Now it is one click, and open
YouTube tabs follow it either way.

Switched off, Dumbify injects nothing at all — no stylesheet, no bundle. The reading
view is registered at runtime rather than declared in the manifest, so off costs you
nothing on a page it is not touching, and there is no blank frame before YouTube appears.

More in the popup. Text Size and Font alongside the toggles, drawing on the same
lists as the full Settings page, plus a link to rate Dumbify.

Shorts are tagged, not numbered. The numbers in history are its reading order, and a
Short is not a place in it — an afternoon of them used to spend twenty numbers and push
the video you were looking for down to 47. The bundle now carries the Shorts mark, and
real entries read 01, 02, 03 straight through it. The mark is drawn rather than shipped
as a picture, so it takes your reading colour: black on paper, white at night, or
whatever you picked in Settings.

Fixed

• Cmd-click, Ctrl-click, Shift-click and middle-click now open a new tab from history
  rows, playlist rows, channel cards, the sidebar and the brand. The sidebar was built
  from buttons, which cannot be opened in a tab at all, and the rows cancelled the
  browser's default before it could act on the modifier.
• Comments say "Comments are turned off" when they are, rather than "no comments yet".
• Shorts in /history collapse into one row instead of being listed individually.
• Refreshed icons at every size, and a store name and description that say what the
  extension actually does.

Known limits

• The channel name inside a video row still will not open in a new tab. It sits inside
  the row's own link, and nested links are not valid HTML — fixing it means restructuring
  the row.
• The toolbar popup has square corners. Chrome paints the popup window itself and ignores
  a transparent document, so a radius only exposes the frame as white notches.

---

Load dumbify1.1.0.zip unpacked from chrome://extensions, or wait for the Chrome Web
Store update.

v1.0.0 - dumbify, YouTube reimagined

Dumbify v1.0.0

A calm, text-first YouTube.

First public release. Dumbify sits on top of youtube.com and renders it as a plain,
readable list — no thumbnails, no autoplay, no recommendation rabbit holes. You stay
signed in, and subscriptions, history, and comments all keep working.

Features

Text-first feed — titles, channel, views, and upload date. No thumbnails, across
home, search, channel pages, history, subscriptions, and watch later.

Distraction-free watch page — title, description, and comments. No autoplay, no
end-screen suggestions, no "up next" sidebar.

Focus mode — press F for a full-screen, chrome-free player.

Real interactions, not a read-only mirror — subscribe and unsubscribe, like
comments, reply, and view replies, all backed by YouTube's actual API using your
signed-in session.

Typography controls — 8 font sizes, 8 font families across serif, sans, and mono,
plus light and dark themes.

Keyboard-driven — Cmd/Ctrl+K to search, F for focus mode.

Infinite scroll — loads more of the real feed as you go.

How it works

Dumbify doesn't scrape the rendered page or proxy YouTube's backend. On page load it
reads the same ytInitialData / ytInitialPlayerResponse JSON that YouTube itself
renders from, and calls the same InnerTube API YouTube's own frontend uses for
pagination, subscribing, and posting comments.

Everything you do in Dumbify hits YouTube's real endpoints with your real session.
There is no shadow account, no separate write path, and no data leaves your browser.

Privacy

Dumbify collects nothing and has no server.

• Display preferences are stored locally via chrome.storage.local and never transmitted
• No analytics, telemetry, crash reporting, or tracking of any kind
• Requests go only to youtube.com
• Permissions are limited to storage, scripting, and host access to youtube.com

Full policy: https://edenreb.github.io/dumbify/PRIVACY

Technical

• Manifest V3, TypeScript, Vite via @crxjs/vite-plugin
• Zero runtime dependencies — plain DOM, no UI framework
• Hand-written CSS, no preprocessor
• No remote code: no eval, no dynamic Function, no remotely-loaded scripts
• 46 unit tests over the extraction and formatting logic (npm test)

Install

Available from the Chrome Web Store, or build from source:

npm install && npm run build