YouTube Home Blocker

YouTube Home Blocker — Redirect & Focus

YouTube Home Blocker is a lightweight and efficient Chrome extension designed to enhance productivity by redirecting the YouTube homepage to a custom URL of your choice. With this extension, users can bypass the overwhelming recommendations feed and land directly on a designated webpage, such as a to-do list or calendar, ensuring a focused browsing experience.

Key Features

• Custom Redirects: Redirect the YouTube homepage (https://www.youtube.com/) to any URL that suits your workflow. Users can set their landing page to their task management tool or any other website, thereby eliminating distractions.
• Seamless YouTube Functionality: While the homepage is redirected, all other YouTube functionalities including search, video pages, subscriptions, and history remain fully operational.
• Smart Redirection: A content script executes at the early stage of page load, monitoring specifically for the homepage. When detected, it promptly redirects to the specified URL before any content is rendered, preventing the display of distracting videos and recommendations.

Advantages

The YouTube homepage can often be a major distraction due to its continuous feed of suggested videos. This extension addresses this challenge effectively:

• Enhanced Focus: Minimize distractions by skipping the YouTube feed and starting work directly on your tasks.
• Easy to Use: The extension is straightforward to install and configure. The default redirect is set to the Todoist Today view (https://app.todoist.com/app/today), but this can be adjusted at any time via the extension’s settings.

How It Works

The extension utilizes a content script that runs at document_start on every visit to YouTube. It evaluates if the path is exactly / and then uses location.replace() to redirect as specified. This process not only works for the primary page load but also ensures that any subsequent navigation back to the homepage within the YouTube app is redirected as well.

Project Structure

The project is organized simply without any complex build steps or dependencies:

File	Purpose
manifest.json	Defines the extension settings and permissions.
constants.js	Contains shared constants including the default redirect URL.
content.js	Handles the homepage redirection logic.
popup.html	Provides the interface for configuring the redirect URL.
popup.js	Manages saving/retrieving the redirect URL via chrome.storage.sync.
icons/	Contains the extension and store icons in various sizes.

This extension is built with plain JavaScript and HTML, ensuring compatibility and ease of use straight out of the box without extra setup.

For those looking to reclaim valuable time spent on distracting video feeds, YouTube Home Blocker offers a practical, no-nonsense solution.