TL;DR: Control Panel for YouTube, UnTrap, and DeArrow all quiet YouTube down without making you leave the account, the browser, or the ecosystem behind. That's the whole point and the whole limit: you still get Google's ranking, you just stop looking at what it hands you. Control Panel is free and open source on Chrome and Firefox; the native Safari app is $3.99 once, no subscription. UnTrap is $4.99 once for all 250+ controls; an optional $3.99/month or $35.99/year adds cross-device sync and unlimited AI video summaries, which send content to a third party. DeArrow fixes a different problem, clickbait titles and thumbnails, not the algorithm, and is free with an optional $1 license.

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Saying No to Video Crack

Yesterday, in the second installment of this series on building a better YouTube experience, I wrote about three apps that build a subscriptions-only feed by avoiding the recommendation algorithm entirely. That's the solution I endorse. It's also work: a new app, a different login situation, in one case giving up your account entirely.

Not everyone wants that. Maybe you've got YouTube Premium and don't want to lose ad-free playback. Maybe your watch history and real subscriptions matter more than you want to admit. Maybe you just don't want another app.

There are still options. The three below don't get you off Google's radar. They just make youtube.com stop trying to hand you free samples of video crack.

Control Panel for YouTube

Control Panel doesn't offer a single "distraction-free" toggle. It's dozens of individual switches for deciding what YouTube is allowed to put on screen: disable video previews, hide Shorts entirely, kill autoplay, remove Related videos, strip end cards and end-screen suggestions, turn off the Home feed, hide suggested sections in Home, Subscriptions, and Search, hide comments, remove Premium upsells, tidy the sidebar, and force theater mode to actually fill the window instead of leaving it boxed in.

The Chrome and Firefox extensions are free and open source. The native Safari app, which is how it runs on Mac, is $3.99 once, no subscription, no in-app purchases. Both the Chrome Web Store and Safari App Store listings disclose no data collection. Current version 1.35.2, last updated in July 2026. On iOS and iPadOS the extension has to be manually enabled in Settings after install, a one-time Apple quirk, not a Control Panel problem.

Developer: Jonny Buchanan, soitis.dev.

UnTrap

If Control Panel is the restrained version, UnTrap is the kitchen sink. The developer advertises 250+ controls: hiding Shorts, comments, Related, and suggested videos; removing sidebars, trending tabs, and notifications; redirecting the homepage; blurring or hiding thumbnails; blocking videos, channels, or comments by keyword or regex; scheduled focus sessions and opening delays; custom hotkeys.

On the Mac App Store it's $4.99, one time. All 250+ of the controls above work at that price. The developer said so directly in an App Store response: no subscription needed for those features. What the optional subscription, $3.99/month or $35.99/year, actually unlocks is settings sync across devices and unlimited AI video summaries; without it you still get three summaries a day.

Those AI summaries are the one feature that doesn't fit the spirit of privacy I try to encourage here. Generating them means sending video content to a third-party service, a different privacy posture than everything else UnTrap does locally in your browser. If you use UnTrap, that's the toggle to look at twice, whether or not you ever pay for the subscription.

It runs on Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, and Brave. One real limit on iOS: the Safari extension doesn't work inside the YouTube app itself, only inside Safari.

Developer: Yevhen Tretiakov.

DeArrow

Control Panel and UnTrap fight what YouTube puts around the video. DeArrow fights what's on the thumbnail.

It crowdsources replacement titles and thumbnails: viewers submit plain, descriptive titles and screenshots pulled from an actual timestamp, then vote on the best ones. With no submission yet, DeArrow auto-formats the original title into proper Title Case or Sentence case instead of leaving the arrows and shocked faces alone, and swaps in a random in-video frame for the thumbnail instead of whatever the algorithm favored.

This isn't solving the same problem as the other two. It's not hiding recommendations; it's making the ones you do see less manipulative. Worth running alongside either of the above, not instead of them.

Open source, built on the same codebase as SponsorBlock by the same developer, works on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari for macOS and iOS. Free to use, with a $1 one-time license if you want to support it.

What I left out

Unhook is the extension most people mention alongside these three, but I'm not testing it because it doesn't have a Safari build. Switching browsers regularly to cut down on fingerprinting means a tool that excludes one of the three I use isn't a real option for me. If you're locked into Chrome or Firefox and don't share that constraint, it's worth a look, but it doesn't meet my needs.

Unless otherwise noted, anything mentioned above beyond Control Panel, UnTrap, and DeArrow is based on research, not testing on my end.

Who this is for

If you're keeping your Google account and your Premium subscription, browsing youtube.com in Safari or Chrome, and you just want less noise while you're there, start with Control Panel. It's free on Chrome and Firefox, $3.99 once on Safari, does the most with the least, collects nothing, and never asks you to subscribe to anything. Add UnTrap, $4.99 once, if you want deeper filtering by keyword or channel. The subscription is skippable unless sync or unlimited AI summaries actually matter to you, and if privacy is the reason you're here, that's the toggle to leave off either way. Add DeArrow regardless; it solves a problem the other two don't touch, and it's free.

What this doesn't do

None of this stops YouTube from knowing what you watch. It doesn't stop the algorithm from running. It just stops you from seeing only what Google decides is best for you, which means best for Google.

The apps in my previous post isolate you from Google. These three just make it easy to ignore. Both are legitimate solutions. They're not the same when it comes to your privacy. You turned the volume down. Google’s still in the room