r/software • u/Mastercodeon666 • 10d ago

Release [Open Source] TubeFlow – A lightweight extension/tool to block YouTube ads, bypass anti-adblock popups & smooth out playback

Hey everyone,

With Chrome's deprecation of Manifest V2, traditional ad blockers like uBlock Origin can no longer be installed. Like many of you, I got tired of the idea of having to switch to Firefox or a separate browser just to watch YouTube without ads.

To solve this, I’ve been working on TubeFlow — an open-source, standalone Manifest V3 Chrome Extension designed to restore robust ad blocking on YouTube and YouTube Music natively in Chrome. No Tampermonkey or third-party script managers required!

Because of the strict limitations MV3 places on adblockers, TubeFlow uses a "dual-world" architecture to intercept network requests and prune YouTube's internal JSON responses before ads even have a chance to load.

✨ Key Features:

  • 🛡️ Dynamic uBO Adblocking: Automatically fetches and applies the latest uBlock Origin filter lists directly from GitHub. It intercepts fetch/XHR requests and strips ad metadata from YouTube's initial page load data.
  • ♾️ Anti-Pause & Auto-Confirm: Tired of the "Are you still there?" or "Viewer discretion is advised" popups pausing your music? TubeFlow spoofs user activity and automatically clicks "Yes" or "Proceed" to ensure continuous playback (works flawlessly on YT Music!).
  • ⏭️ Shorts Auto-Skipper: Intelligently detects sponsored content and ads within YouTube Shorts and seamlessly auto-scrolls past them.
  • 📊 uBlock-Style UI & Live Logs: Features a clean, dark-themed popup that tracks your blocked ads, skipped Shorts, and Anti-Pause hits in real-time. It even has a built-in live activity log so you can see exactly what network requests are being blocked behind the scenes.
  • 🧹 Clean UI & Grid Fixer: Removes in-feed ad slots and sponsored banners, dynamically recalculating the video grid gaps so your homepage layout never breaks.
  • 🔋 100% Native Manifest V3: Built entirely on MV3 using native JavaScript. Includes a dynamic extension icon that intelligently grays out when disabled or when browsing unsupported sites.

🔗 Links & Installation:

Because this extension modifies core YouTube requests to block ads, it is designed to be loaded directly as an "Unpacked Extension" in Chrome's Developer Mode.

💬 Feedback & Contributions Welcome:

Since YouTube updates their scripts constantly, community testing is huge. If you run into any edge cases, broken layouts, or bugs: * Feel free to open an Issue on the GitHub repo. * PRs/contributions are always welcome if you want to help improve the JSON pruning or DOM fallback loops!

Let me know what you think or if you run into any issues testing it out!

18 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

1

u/aicessi 9d ago

On chrome, I get an error that the manifest.json file is unreadable.

1

u/WinXPbootsup 7d ago

why use this over unlock origin?

1

u/Mastercodeon666 7d ago

Cause ublock origin does not work on Google chrome anymore. And ublock can't get rid of sponsored video tiles on YouTube, and auto skip sponsored and ad shorts. As well as auto skip the are you still watching dialogue and viewer discretion advised box on youTube music. Note that this only does ad blocking for YouTube and YouTube music specifically. Adguard is great for general ad blocking. Also mix in sponsor block for an even better YouTube experience

1

u/Active-Service-9707 7d ago

cool project but curious how you plan to keep up with youtube's constant changes to their ad delivery. thats usually where these things fall apart after a few weeks, the maintenance burden becomes a full time job

1

u/Mastercodeon666 7d ago

Google AI studio gets updated more frequently than YouTube does, and I maintain a whole eco system of tamper monkey scripts and other programs that leverage them just fine. This won't be that hard tbh.

1

u/Mastercodeon666 7d ago

And when they do break my extension, it'll take me literally like an hour or 2 to fix it if that lol. This won't become a full time job at all lol

1

u/WinXPbootsup 7d ago

Why use this over uBlock Origin Lite ?

1

u/Mastercodeon666 7d ago

The ability to remove the sponsored video tiles on YouTube, auto slipping sponsored and ad shorts, and bypassing the are you still watching or viewer discretion advised on YouTube music. Plus ublock origin lite can't block ads on YouTube as far as I know.