And in another episode of "YouTube is worse than a car without brakes", Mountain View doesn't seem to have registered any complaint, and continues with its strategy of getting everyone on the "Premium" train. We still have difficulties performing basic actions like capturing the screen or predefining video quality before playback, and our only alternative is to seek support from extensions like Iridium, which integrates seamlessly into the official interface.
Performance problems, limitations in its web interface, lack of advanced features, offline playback blocked by a paywall... in short, YouTube is not well. Our recent articles have focused on options such as external clients and replacements for its official environment, however, the truth is that YouTube could improve remarkably by doing very little. It's a pity that Mountain View's will points elsewhere, but at least we have allies in the form of extensions, and one of the most interesting is Iridium.
Optimize your YouTube experience with Iridium
Iridium divides its configuration into several categories. "General" offers the possibility to sync the extension and export our parameters. "Website" allows us to force dark mode, redirect the click on the logo to the subscriptions page, visit specific tabs when entering a channel, and block all access to Shorts. By far, "Video page" is the most important section: there we find commands to reduce focus on the page while a video plays, activate a super-theater mode that covers the screen, force a resolution (whether higher or lower) on all videos, modify playback speed by default, and disable elements like annotations, info cards, and the screen at the end of videos.
It is also worth mentioning that Iridium includes commands to capture a frame of the video at its native resolution, open the thumbnail with the highest available quality, and configure certain channels on a blacklist to avoid the appearance of their content. As if that were not enough, Iridium gets along quite well with other extensions that modify YouTube (for example, I found no conflicts when combining it with YouTube Redux), but I imagine this does not apply to 100% of cases. Anyway, I definitely recommend trying it. Links below!
Download Iridium (Chrome): Click here
Download Iridium (Firefox): Click here
