dumbify

Dumbify

A calm, text-first YouTube.

Dumbify is a Chrome extension that reads YouTube’s real data and renders it as a plain, readable list — no thumbnails, no autoplay, no recommendation rabbit holes. It sits on top of youtube.com, not a separate site: you stay signed in, subscriptions/history/comments all still work, you just stop getting yelled at by the UI.

Why

YouTube’s UI is built to maximize watch time, not help you find or finish a video. Dumbify strips it back to what a feed actually is: a list of titles, channels, and durations you can scan and pick from.

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 sidebar of “up next”
• Focus mode — press F for a full-screen, chrome-free player
• Real interactions, not a read-only mirror — subscribe/unsubscribe, like comments, reply to comments, view replies, all backed by YouTube’s actual API using your signed-in session
• Typography controls — 8 font sizes, 8 font families (serif, sans, mono), light/dark theme
• 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 replace YouTube’s backend. On page load it reads the same ytInitialData / ytInitialPlayerResponse JSON YouTube itself uses to render, and the same InnerTube API YouTube’s own frontend calls for pagination, subscribing, and posting comments. Everything you can do in Dumbify hits YouTube’s real endpoints with your real session — there’s no shadow account, no separate write path, and no data leaves your browser.

Install

1. Clone the repo
2. npm install
3. npm run build
4. Open chrome://extensions, enable Developer Mode, click Load unpacked, and select the dist/ folder

Development

npm run dev      # vite dev, watch mode with HMR
npm run build    # production build to dist/ (reload the unpacked extension after)
npm run preview  # vite preview

npx tsc --noEmit                        # typecheck
npx tsc -p tsconfig.node.json --noEmit  # typecheck vite.config.ts + manifest.ts, if changed

After any change: npm run build, then reload the extension from chrome://extensions and check the console for [Dumbify]-prefixed errors.

Tech stack

TypeScript + Vite (via @crxjs/vite-plugin), Manifest V3, hand-written CSS. No UI framework, no runtime dependencies — plain DOM.

Project structure

src/
  content.ts        content script entry — routes pages to features
  background.ts     service worker — page-context data bridging
  core/              DataExtractor, FeatureManager, PageManager, UIEngine, storage
  features/
    shell.ts         top bar, search, sidebar (always active)
    home-feed.ts      home / search / channel / history / subscriptions / watch later / playlists
    watch-page.ts     video player, info, comments
  options/, popup/    settings UI

See CLAUDE.md for the full architecture and data-extraction notes.

License

GPL-3.0 — see LICENSE.

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