panzi / Intercept YouTube Links

Published:

Version: 1.0+06fd76d

Summary: Inserts a hop to all watch links on YouTube in order to disable auto-play. The link won't be inserted by a normal click, only middle-click/context menu/D'n'D.

Groups:

License: MIT; https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

Intercept YouTube Links

For some stupid reason YouTube automatically plays videos on the watch page.
This makes it basically unusable to me, because I want to browse YouTube and
open many videos in tabs and then watch one tab after the other (or let it open
in the browser session for some days before I close it again).

Up until now I could force YouTube to use the flash plugin (by sending an old
Safari user agent string) and then I used the click-to-play functionality of
Chrome/Firefox to stop flash from automatically playing. But this does not work
anymore, and neither did all the "disable YouTube autoplay" add-ons/extensions.

So I wrote this simple add-on that simply replaces all links to YouTube watch
pages with a link to a "hop-page" that provides the real link (and a video
thumbnail).

However, you will only get to the hop-page if you open the link in a new tab or
window (via middle-click/context menu/D'n'D). Otherwise the normal watch page
will still load so your normal YouTube browsing will not be disturbed (note: it
will break YouTubes fancy dynamic page loading, which cause more troubles than
good for me anyway, and revert to plain old page instead).

Installation

This add-on comes in three variants: A Chrome extension, a Firefox add-on and
a user script. To install any of these extensions you first have to download
them and then drop them into your browser. For the Chrome extension you need
to drop the file into the extensions setting window. If you want to use the
user script with Firefox you first have to install the Grease Monkey
add-on.

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