YT_PROTOCOL_FILTER // DE-ALGORITHMIZE YOUR ATTENTION

Exactly the controls you need — nothing you don’t.

The extension is intentionally minimal: every switch in the popup maps to a real behavior in the codebase — no dark UX, no hidden “experiments”, just flags you can reason about.

Bell dropdown, decluttered Bell filter

Hide Shorts noise, keep the uploads.

Hide Shorts notifications specifically in the bell menu while leaving normal uploads untouched, so you can finally see the things you actually subscribed for.

Notifications page filter Stable surface

Clean, dedicated signal surface.

Clean up the dedicated notifications page without touching the homepage layout that YouTube constantly rewires. Focus on what’s stable and under your control.

Protocol Upgrade redirect Smart redirect

/shorts → /watch, automatically.

If a Shorts link sneaks in, you can silently upgrade it to the full watch page instead of getting pulled into the vertical doom-scroll pit.

Theme control, in one place System aware

Light / Dark, without mystery.

Flip YouTube between System / Light / Dark right from the popup — useful if your browser theme doesn’t quite match how you use YouTube at night.

Creator whitelist Selective bypass

Let a few Shorts through on purpose.

Add channels whose Shorts you actually want to see. Their content is always allowed through; everything else obeys the filter rules.

Manifest V3 & lean runtime Under the hood

No frameworks. Just DOM surgery.

Built on Manifest V3 with a background service worker and mutation observers — no bloated frameworks, just the DOM surgery required to get the job done.

Install in under a minute

The extension ships as a simple unpacked folder — perfect for GitHub Pages and power users who prefer reading the code they run.

shell · manual install

1. Clone the repository from GitHub

   git clone https://github.com/itsXactlY/yt-shorts-notification-filter.git
   cd yt-shorts-notification-filter

2. Open Chrome, Edge or Brave and navigate to:

   chrome://extensions

3. Enable "Developer mode" (top-right corner).

4. Click "Load unpacked" and select the
   yt-shorts-notification-filter folder.

5. Reload YouTube and open the notification bell.

   Shorts should now be filtered from:
   - the bell dropdown
   - the notifications page

   (Homepage Shorts are intentionally untouched, by design.)

Extension runs as a multiple-unpacked instance — perfect for GitHub Pages and users who prefer source-visible tools.

Transparent by default

No telemetry, no remote config. Everything about how Shorts are detected and removed lives in plain JavaScript inside content.js and the popup UI.

manifest.json · excerpt

{
  "manifest_version": 3,
  "name": "YouTube Shorts Notification Filter",
  "version": "1.1.0",
  "description": "Filters Shorts from YouTube notifications and optionally redirects Shorts URLs to regular watch pages.",
  "permissions": ["storage"],
  "host_permissions": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/*",
    "https://youtube.com/*"
  ],
  "background": { "service_worker": "background.js" },
  "content_scripts": [
    {
      "matches": [
        "https://www.youtube.com/*",
        "https://youtube.com/*"
      ],
      "js": ["content.js"],
      "run_at": "document_start"
    }
  ],
  "action": {
    "default_popup": "popup.html",
    "default_title": "Shorts Filter"
  }
}

No analytics SDKs, no external calls. Just a small MV3 worker and a DOM-side filter that you can audit in one sitting.