Stop YouTube Shorts

Shorts are designed to be entered by accident. One thumbnail on the home page, one card between two search results, and you are in a vertical feed with no end — the next video has already started before you decided to watch it. Twenty minutes later you are still there, and you never chose to be. The reliable fix is not willpower. It is never being offered the first one. Stop YouTube Shorts removes those entry points from the YouTube desktop site, so the loop never starts. WHAT IT REMOVES • Shorts shelves on the home page, subscriptions, search results and the watch page • Shorts cards mixed into search results and suggested videos • The Shorts tab on a channel • The Shorts button in the left sidebar — hidden by default, and you can turn it back on Your feed goes back to ordinary videos: ones that end, and that you picked. HOW IT WORKS The extension is essentially a single stylesheet, injected as the page starts loading. No polling loop, no background worker, no MutationObserver: the browser's own CSS engine keeps up with infinite scroll, so Shorts loaded further down the feed disappear as they arrive — no flicker, no measurable slowdown. The sidebar button is hidden without waiting for any setting to load, so it never flashes on screen before disappearing. There is no moment in which you can click it out of reflex. SETTINGS Click the toolbar icon for the single option: hide the Shorts button in the left sidebar, or keep it. The same panel is available from chrome://extensions → Details → Extension options. Several open windows stay in sync, and a setting that fails to save says so instead of silently reverting. PRIVACY No tracking, no analytics, no accounts, no data sold or shared. Nothing is sent to any server operated by the developer. The extension stores one true/false preference through Chrome's own storage, which Chrome may synchronize between your browsers if you have Chrome Sync enabled. Besides running on www.youtube.com, storage is the only permission it requests. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO This extension closes the doors; it does not lock the room. It hides elements, and is not a content blocker. • Direct youtube.com/shorts/... links still open and the player still works — follow a Short someone sent you, and you are in the feed • The Shorts filter in the search bar stays visible, on purpose • A Short opened through a normal /watch?v=... link may still be visible • Hiding an element does not stop YouTube from loading it in the background • Desktop www.youtube.com only: not m.youtube.com, not YouTube Music, not embedded players • The interface is in English YouTube renames its internal components regularly. If Shorts reappear somewhere, write to the developer contact address shown on this listing with the page and what you saw, and the selectors will be updated. REQUIREMENTS Chrome 105 or later. Not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by YouTube or Google. "YouTube" and "Shorts" are used only to describe what this extension acts on.