Must-have Google and YouTube Extensions for 2024

Hello all,

I'm going to lay out the extensions I use on a daily basis. I often recommend these to people who are looking to make their browsing experience more productive. I am not sponsored or affiliated with any of these extension devs. I do of course use way more extensions than these, which I'll cover in a future post.

Google and Youtube NCR

Some of us, like yours truly, live as expats in other countries. Even those that don't, many of them use VPNs to jump over walls and access things that are region blocked, so in the eyes of the internet, you're "expating"... The side-effect of using a VPN or being somewhere other than your native country is that your Google results will show up in that region's language and your search results are often in another language. I couldn't find a word for this internet browsing phenomenon and had to dig past the third page of Google results, but I found that Google was using "country redirect". If for example, you're someone who is currently in Germany, and you typed google.com, this would automatically change to something like google.de if your IP address is seen as German to Google. Luckily, there was some smart extension developer who already thought of this problem ages before I did and put out a duct-tape fix for it. The duct-tape here is called NCR (no country redirect).

Unhook YouTube

This browser extension hides whatever you don't want to see on Youtube, from recommended videos, to comment sections, to the suggested home page videos. This is great for hiding any "embarrassing" suggestions that show up on your front page just because you watched that one video, you weirdo. Just kidding.

Blocktube

Occasionally, you'll come across a YouTube channel or video that keeps showing up in your feed or search results but is often a misleading or clickbait title. Despite you pressing "dislike", or using different menu options that are on YouTube like "recommend less of this", those videos still show up. Luckily, this extension completely eradicates those videos and channels from your feed and search depending on how much of a grudge you have against them lol.

Video Speed Controller

I listen to non-fiction audiobooks and podcasts on more than 1.5 times speed, sometimes 3x speed if there's a lot of "fluff" and "filler" in the content where I am not needed to be that invested in it or I knew the types of examples they are going to be supplementing with whatever main theme they're trying to get across because it's already old knowledge for me. Sometimes though, even movies and videos have a degree of predictability after you've seen enough of them, I think the word is "tropes" or "story archs", you know like how every tragic love story is Romeo and Julliet in some way. Anyway, regardless of what your complaint is, you can expedite the YouTube video to get to the point by speeding it up with a few quick and easy keyboard shortcuts .

Don't forget to leave a comment about what kind of extensions you use below!