Best Chrome Extensions for YouTube (2026)

Eight actively maintained YouTube extensions with real user numbers and ratings, which ones conflict, and a straight answer on ad blockers.

There are thousands of Chrome extensions for YouTube and most of them are abandoned, broken by the last redesign, or a wrapper around something the browser already does. This is a short list of ones that are actively maintained and solve a problem people actually have, with user numbers and ratings taken from the Chrome Web Store in August 2026.

Disclosure: AI Video Dub, in the translation section, is ours. It is also the smallest thing on this list by a wide margin, and the section says so.

The list at a glance

Extension	What it fixes	Users	Rating
Return YouTube Dislike	Dislike counts are hidden	5,000,000	4.5 (19.8K)
Video Speed Controller	Speed control is clumsy	3,000,000	4.5 (4.5K)
SponsorBlock	Sponsor reads waste your time	2,000,000	4.6 (3.5K)
Enhancer for YouTube	Player lacks controls	1,000,000	4.7 (17.4K)
Unhook	Recommendations eat your evening	1,000,000	4.9 (4.4K)
YouTube Dubbing — Translate & Dub	Video is in another language	200,000	4.2 (748)
livdub	Same, on any tab	50,000	4.7 (64)
AI Video Dub	Same, with no daily cap	3,000	4.5 (19)

All of these are free to install. Figures are from the Chrome Web Store in August 2026 and move around.

Watch faster: Video Speed Controller

Three million users, and the one on this list that changes how you use YouTube the most. YouTube's own speed menu tops out at 2× and takes three clicks. This gives you keyboard shortcuts — S and D to slow down and speed up, Z and X to rewind and advance ten seconds — across any HTML5 video, so it works on Netflix and local files too, not only YouTube.

The range runs from 0.07× to 16×, which sounds silly until you use 3× on a slow lecture. Per-site rules let you default to 1× on Netflix and 2× on YouTube.

Skip the filler: SponsorBlock

Two million users, 4.6 stars. It skips sponsor segments, subscription begging and intro filler using timestamps submitted by other viewers. On a channel with a ninety-second sponsor read every video, the time saved is real.

Worth being clear about what this is and is not: it skips creator-inserted sponsor reads, not YouTube's own ads. Those are two different things and only one of them is a fight with YouTube.

Because the data is crowdsourced, coverage is excellent on large channels and patchy on small ones. Submitting segments yourself takes a few seconds and improves it for everyone.

Take back the interface: Unhook and Enhancer for YouTube

Both have a million users and they solve different halves of the same problem.

Unhook — 4.9 stars from 4,400 ratings, the highest on this list — removes things. Homepage feed, sidebar recommendations, Shorts, comments, trending, end screens: each is a separate toggle. Turn off the homepage feed and YouTube stops being a place you browse and becomes a place you search. If you have ever opened YouTube for one video and closed it ninety minutes later, this is the fix.

Enhancer for YouTube adds things instead: playback speed from 0.07× to 16×, volume boost to 10× for badly mixed audio, a wide player beyond theatre mode, dark theme variants, video filters, screenshots and custom shortcuts. There is overlap with Video Speed Controller — if you install Enhancer you probably do not need it.

Judge before you watch: Return YouTube Dislike

Five million users, the largest here. YouTube hid public dislike counts in 2021; this puts an estimate back, built from archived data collected before the change plus votes from extension users.

Be honest with yourself about the accuracy: on old videos it draws on archived numbers, on new ones it extrapolates from the subset of viewers running the extension. The ratio is directionally useful for spotting a tutorial that does not work, and it is not a precise figure.

Watch in another language

The category we work in, so weigh accordingly. Three actively maintained options, and they take genuinely different approaches.

YouTube Dubbing — Translate & Dub is the established one at 200,000 users. It goes beyond YouTube to Bilibili, Udemy and Coursera, ships for Firefox and Android, and Premium adds multi-speaker detection. The free tier stops at five videos a day.

livdub has the highest rating in this category at 4.7 and an unusual model: it dubs any browser tab, and it is free because you supply your own Google Gemini API key. Excellent if you are comfortable creating an API key, a wall if you are not.

AI Video Dub is ours and it is tiny — 3,000 users against 200,000 for the leader. What it does differently is not count your videos: no daily cap, all 50+ languages and all 400+ voices on the free tier, and subtitles export as SRT. It only works on YouTube and only in Chrome.

If you want these three properly compared rather than summarised, we did that in the translation extension comparison.

What about ad blockers and downloaders

Two categories people expect on a list like this, and both deserve a straight answer rather than a recommendation.

Ad blocking on YouTube is an arms race. Extensions get broken by YouTube, updated by their authors, broken again. Anything we named would likely be in a different state by the time you read it, and YouTube has become steadily more aggressive about detection. Look at current reviews rather than an article's recommendation.

Downloading videos you do not own is against YouTube's Terms of Service, and Chrome Web Store policy does not allow extensions that do it. Extensions claiming to are either doing something else or will not last. For your own videos, YouTube Studio has a download button.

How many should you install

Fewer than you think. Extensions that modify the YouTube player all touch the same page, and they conflict:

Two speed controllers fight over the same setting and the speed jumps around.
Two dubbing extensions both start talking. Run one.
Enhancer plus Unhook both hide recommendations. Harmless, but configure it in one place or you will spend an afternoon wondering which one did what.
Ad blockers plus anything that reads captions can conflict — the blocker sometimes stops the subtitle request the other extension needs.

Every extension also gets permission to read and change the pages it runs on. That is unavoidable for a tool that modifies YouTube, but it means installing eight of them is eight things to trust. Three or four that you actually use beats a folder of them.

Which to install, by what annoys you

YouTube eats my time — Unhook. Hide the homepage feed first.
Tutorials are too slow — Video Speed Controller.
Sponsor reads — SponsorBlock.
The player is limited — Enhancer for YouTube.
I cannot tell if a tutorial works — Return YouTube Dislike.
The best content is in another language — a dubbing extension; which one depends on whether you need other sites and how many videos a day you watch.

Questions

Do these work in Edge, Brave or Opera? Usually, since they are Chromium-based and can install from the Chrome Web Store. Edge is the least reliable in practice: it shuts background service workers down more aggressively, so extensions that keep a session sometimes lose it after a restart.

Do they work on a phone? No. Chrome on Android and iOS does not support extensions. Firefox for Android and Kiwi run some of them.

Will they slow YouTube down? Individually, not noticeably. Collectively, yes — each one runs code on every page load.

Are they safe? These are established extensions with large user bases and public review histories, which is the best signal available. Check what permissions an extension asks for and whether the reviews look recent and real before installing anything not on a list like this.