Nobody told me I could get YouTube Premium features for free with 6 Chrome extensions

• Unhook
• Return YouTube Dislike
• Screenshot YouTube
• Enhancer for YouTube
• uBlock Origin Lite

All things considered, YouTube Premium is pretty great. Aside from ad-free video streaming, the subscription-based service also offers dedicated access to a massive music library, the ability to play videos with your phone screen turned off, the option to download media for watching without an internet connection, and several other smaller perks sprinkled throughout.

When it comes to watching YouTube on mobile, nothing beats the YouTube Premium experience (unless you happen to have an Android phone with ReVanced or NewPipe installed, that is). However, the calculus changes quite a bit when it comes to streaming YouTube content on a Mac or PC using a desktop web browser like Google Chrome.

Modern PC-class web browsers offer compatibility with a wide selection of software plug-ins known as extensions, with Google Chrome leading the pack in terms of available options on the market. Naturally, there are a number of extensions out there that are designed to tap into the YouTube website, all of which help in supplementing the video-watching experience.

The web browser extensions featured throughout this list are accessible from the Chrome Web Store, and they’re designed with Google Chrome specifically in mind. While they should play nice with most other Chromium-based web browsers like Microsoft Edge or Brave, compatibility isn’t a guarantee.

Here are six third-party Chrome browser extensions that I personally use to supplement my own YouTube experience on desktop. Each of these entries are free to download and install, and some offer functions that negate the need to pay for Premium access to the site entirely.

Unhook

For a distraction-free streaming experience

Unhook is one of several excellent browser extensions designed to reign in on YouTube addiction. The lightweight plug-in offers individual toggles to turn on or off various elements of the streaming website’s user interface, ranging from the home feed, to viewer comments, and everything in between.

Sometimes there’s a specific YouTube video I want to watch for research purposes, and I find myself quickly absorbed into the algorithmic vortex that is the recommended videos sidebar on the site. With Unhook toggled on, I can safely watch the content I need to in the moment without having to manually resist that all-too familiar ‘just one more video’ temptation.

Aside from Unhook, there are several other excellent Chrome extensions that can help you home in on a distraction-free YouTube experience. Some popular options include:

Return YouTube Dislike

To bring back a sorely missing feature

A while back, YouTube made the sweeping decision to remove the public-facing dislike counter from all videos uploaded onto its website. This decision has proven controversial, and I, for one, lament its loss (it’s always been a good gauge of whether a given video sticks the landing, or whether it’s plagued by misinformation, biases, or clickbait).

Interestingly, the ability to dislike videos on YouTube hasn’t actually been stripped away — it’s just not user-facing anymore, but channel owners can continue to view the metric on a private basis. As it so happens, the third-party Return YouTube Dislike extension can restore the dislike bar to all its glory, though it does rely on estimations, archival data, and more to approximate its count.

For acoustic convenience

YouTube Volume Scroll is a simple and straightforward browser extension that makes controlling audio levels more in-depth and powerful. It works across both YouTube and YouTube Music, and it unlocks a very useful mouse scroll wheel gesture for adjusting volume. Other notable functions include (optionally) displaying the volume on-screen within the YouTube interface, remembering volume levels in incognito mode, and stripping away the Continue watching popup from the website automatically.

Screenshot YouTube

For capturing snippets of content

Screenshot YouTube is another lightweight browser extension that’s designed with one single purpose in mind. In this case, it’s to make taking screenshots of individual YouTube video frames a more convenient process. When enabled, the plug-in adds an inconspicuous ‘screenshot’ button into YouTube’s player control strip, and clicking on it promptly saves the exact video frame to your internal storage drive.

For saving quick snippets of information to reference later, Screenshot YouTube is an invaluable tool that I rely on nearly each and every day. It’s lightning quick, it’s reliable, and it’s fairly configurable with optional keyboard shortcuts, the ability to change the default photo file format, and the option to save images to your clipboard in addition to your hard drive.

Enhancer for YouTube

For powering up the entire YouTube experience

Enhancer for YouTube is a full-fledged browser extension designed with YouTube power users in mind. The plug-in offers a whole host of customizable utilities, including for adjusting playback speed, video codecs, custom scripts, keyboard shortcuts, button control locations, and much more.

Thankfully, even with its dizzying number of options, Enhancer for YouTube doesn’t slow down the streaming experience in the slightest, and I find its arsenal of settings to be well organized within a single, streamlined interface.

uBlock Origin Lite

For removing pesky advertisements

For quite some time now, YouTube parent company Google and various ad blocking software providers have been engaging in a cold war over the status of advertisements on the platform. Google, of course, wants users to pay a recurring subscription fee for access to its ad-free YouTube experience, which lies in direct contrast with the ethos of ad blockers, internet freedom advocates, and privacy-centric folks.

Google killed the Manifest V2 (MV2) web browser extension standard within Chrome back in June 2024, which rendered many traditional ad blockers (including my personal favorite, uBlock Origin) partially inoperable. As a result, the newer uBlock Origin Lite has been released onto the Chrome Web Store, which leverages the still-supported Manifest V3 (MV3) standard.

While less capable under-the-hood due to new restrictions in place, the MV3-powered uBlock Origin Lite still manages to disable ads across YouTube the majority of the time in my experience. Of course, with the current chicken-and-egg status quo in mind, Google-issued software updates may at any point render the ad blocker less effective until additional patches are implemented, but such is the way of the modern world of internet streaming services.

If you choose to install an ad blocker on your web browser, I highly recommend making use of the whitelist feature that’s built into most competing options on the market. The majority of YouTubers earn some degree of their income via Google AdSense revenue, which is a system that relies on advertisements. To best support your favorite content creators, consider whitelisting them as to allow ads to play when accessing their videos.

Aside from uBlock Origin Lite, some other popular (MV3-powered) Chrome ad blockers that are still compatible with YouTube include: