Watch-Later-Enhanced-webplugin

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Why it exists

YouTube's own "Watch Later" costs you three clicks, a dropdown and a page you did not want to load — and then the list only works on YouTube. Most videos saved that way are never seen again.

Watch Later Enhanced replaces that with one gesture. Hold Alt, left click any thumbnail, and it is on your list — no navigation, no dropdown, no page load. The list lives in your browser toolbar, reachable from any site.

What it does

Save without leaving the page

Alt + left click any thumbnail, or the player itself, and the video is saved. A small HUD confirms it with the video's real title, pulled from the page or from YouTube's oEmbed endpoint if the page does not offer one.

Or from nothing but its link

Paste a YouTube link — youtube.com, the Share button's youtu.be, a Short, a live stream, with or without https:// — anywhere on the list in the popup, or into Info & Settings → Import & export → Add by link. There, anything that is not a YouTube video is refused with the reason, and a video already on the list says which tab it is in rather than being added twice. The popup asks YouTube nothing, so the title, channel and type are filled in by a YouTube tab: at once if one is on screen, otherwise on your next visit.

Take your list with you

Export writes To Watch and Archive to a JSON file; Import reads one back — or a hand-written list of links — and only ever adds: a video already on the list is left exactly as it is, nothing is removed, and an Undo takes the whole import back out. The Guide beside the two buttons opens the guide's own section on them, with the file format, every field and worked examples. A file window closes the toolbar popup in some browsers, silently taking the import with it, so Import always opens the list in a small window of its own first, which it cannot close.

Watch it in a window of its own

Pop any video out of the browser into a floating mini player. Minimize the browser, move to another app, drag the window anywhere — it keeps playing.

• From any thumbnail, without opening it: Alt + Shift + left click it — the gesture that saves a video, with Shift. Or pick Play in mini player from the video's own ⋮ menu. Or hover the thumbnail and use the button in its top-left corner.
• On a video page: Alt + Shift + left click the player, or the mini-player button in YouTube's control bar. The window opens at the second the page had reached, and the page stops playing — one video at a time, never two.
• From the popup: the mini-player button on a saved video plays it immediately in a dedicated window — no tab, nothing to confirm. Pin on top in its corner promotes it to the floating kind.
• Pinned: the browser's own picture-in-picture, with no bar and no window or tab left behind it — the mini player window closes once the video floats. It keeps playing after you close the browser: the extension holds the background permission, so Chrome stays running after its last window, with an icon by the clock. Its controls live in the extension's popup while it floats: play/pause, position, volume and mute, speed, quality, the next video in To Watch, back to the mini player, stop. Captions do not show in it. A mini player that is the only window open when you pin is minimized rather than closed, since the extension cannot tell whether Chrome's own background setting will keep it running.

There is only ever one mini player: asking for the video already in it brings that window forward (or, while it is pinned, leaves it floating where it is), and asking for another opens it in a window that takes the old one's place. It is a window of its own, so closing the page it came from leaves it playing.

The pin itself is a button because it has to be: a browser only grants an always-on-top window in response to a click inside the page, so no preference can ask for one on your behalf.

Organise it the way you think

• Search that looks at titles and tags at once, for the two things anyone remembers about a saved video. The box folds into the filter row when nothing is being searched for, and never while something typed in it is filtering.
• Click a channel name under any video to see only what you saved from it — or a tag, to see only what carries it. Either writes what it did into the search box (channel:Fireship, tag:music), which you can also type; a tag leaves the box folded, since its chip lights up in the tag bar instead.
• A tag bar under the filters: every tag on the list on screen, most used first, one click from filtering by it. One line that scrolls sideways — arrows appear only on a side with more to see — so it never grows with your tags, and it is not there at all until you have one.
• Tags, colour-derived from their own name, with autocomplete.
• Thumbnails — each card opens with the video's picture, the smallest one YouTube publishes (a few KB), loaded only for cards near the screen and kept only in the browser's own cache. One switch in Settings turns them off.
• A numbered queue — every card shows its place in its tab, counting from 1, and takes its new number the moment it is moved. Hover the card and the number becomes the grip you drag it by, in the same spot — a badge in the thumbnail's corner — so a number costs the title nothing.
• Drag and drop to set your own order, in To Watch and in Archive alike. Sorting one tab never moves anything in the other.
• To Watch / Archive / Trash, so finished videos leave the queue without disappearing, and deletions are recoverable.
• A Shorts label on Shorts, with a filter that narrows the list to either kind.
• The channel that published each video, under its title — and clickable.
• Favourites — a heart per row, and a filter that narrows whatever the type chips and the tag search are already showing.
• A sound mixer — a level and an on/off per sound, or silence for the lot.
• Colours you choose — every colour the extension invents for itself comes from one setting: a colour per name worked out from its letters, one neutral for everything, or a single HEX code you give it. A light one flips the lettering to dark so a pale tag stays readable.
• A glass finish — a slider that turns the cards, the toolbar and the settings panel into frosted panes over a lit backdrop, at whatever strength you want, and draws none of it at zero.

Know what you saved

The channel name — and a Shorts label, on a Short — sit on one line under every title, with your own tags on a line of their own below them. Because YouTube serves the same Short behind both /shorts/ and /watch links, the type is worked out from the URL, then from the page around the thumbnail, and finally — when neither settles it — by asking YouTube in the background and correcting the label a moment later. The channel comes from the page when it is there and from YouTube's oembed payload when it is not.

Items saved before a detail existed are filled in a few at a time while you browse YouTube, rather than left permanently blank.

Read the manual without leaving the extension

Settings opens a bundled user guide: searchable, with a table of contents that tracks your scroll position, a full shortcut reference and troubleshooting. It ships inside the extension, so it works offline. Beside it, What's new links to the releases on GitHub, and the version you are running is printed at the foot of the panel — read from the manifest, so it cannot disagree with what you have installed.

Shortcuts

Shortcut	Where	What it does
Alt + left click	Any YouTube thumbnail	Saves it without opening it
Alt + left click	The video player	Saves what you are watching
Alt + Shift + left click	Any thumbnail or title	Plays it in the mini player, without opening it
Alt + Shift + left click	The player on a video page	Opens it in the mini player, from where the page had reached
/	The popup	Opens the search box
Ctrl/⌘ + V	The list in the popup	Adds the YouTube link on the clipboard
Enter	Add by link	Adds the pasted link
Esc	The search box	Clears it and folds it away
Space or K	Mini player	Play / pause
← / →	Mini player	Back / forward 5 seconds
M	Mini player	Mute / unmute
Enter / Esc	Tag box	Add the tag / close without adding
← / →, Home / End	Tag bar	Move along the tags; Enter filters by the one focused

Privacy

There is no server behind this extension. No account, no sign-in, no telemetry, no analytics, no sync. Your list is held in chrome.storage.local on your own machine and is never transmitted anywhere.

Every outbound request the extension itself makes:

To	When	What it carries
youtube.com/oembed	Saving a video whose title the page did not provide, or naming one added by its link	The video URL
youtube.com/shorts/<id>	Saving, to tell a Short from a video	The video ID
i.ytimg.com/vi/<id>/default.jpg	Showing a card's thumbnail, while thumbnails are on	The video ID; no referrer
youtube.com/embed/<id>	While a mini player is open, so Pin on top can float it	The video ID; the embed is loaded in the extension's own offscreen page

That is the complete list of what the extension asks for. The embedded player in the last row is YouTube's own, and loads what it always loads — its scripts, the video, and any ads YouTube serves before it — exactly as on any site that embeds a video. The first two go to YouTube, only from a YouTube tab, and carry nothing about you beyond the video in question — which is why a video added in the popup by its link waits for a YouTube tab to name it rather than the popup asking. The third is YouTube's image server, asked by the popup for the pictures of the cards near the screen; the browser caches them, and the extension stores none. Export and Import write and read a file on your own machine; nothing is uploaded. The extension sends nothing to any other party: the Inter typeface is bundled with the extension rather than fetched from Google, so with thumbnails switched off, opening the popup makes no request at all.

The page's own Content Security Policy enforces it — style-src 'self'; font-src 'self'; — so a remote stylesheet or font could not load even if one were added by mistake.

Permissions requested:

• storage — your list and settings.
• offscreen — the page with no window that the pinned video floats from.
• declarativeNetRequestWithHostAccess and the youtube.com host permission — one session rule that gives that page's YouTube embed the Referer YouTube requires, for requests made outside any tab only.
• background — keeps Chrome running after its last window closes, so a pinned video keeps playing. Chrome then runs in the background whenever the extension is installed, not only while a video floats, and on Windows it starts with your computer.

No tabs, no scripting, no access to any other site.

Install

From the Chrome Web Store — add it here.

From source

git clone https://github.com/adaddariodev/Watch-Later-Enhanced-webplugin.git

Then open chrome://extensions/, turn on Developer mode, click Load unpacked, and select the cloned directory.

Requires Chrome 116+. In Firefox 109+ saving and the list work; the mini player does not, since Firefox does not run the extension's background service worker.

Packaging for the Chrome Web Store

./scripts/package.sh   # → dist/watch-later-enhanced-<version>.zip

It zips an allow-list of the files the extension loads, taken from the last commit rather than the folder: the README, the store copy in docs/ and the logos and promo banners in imgs/ stay out of what users install, and an uncommitted edit can never ship by accident.

How it is built

Vanilla JavaScript, no build step, no dependencies, no framework. Clone it and it runs.

• Manifest V3, with the permissions listed under Privacy and nothing more.
• One delegated listener on document handles every thumbnail on the page, rather than binding to each of the hundreds YouTube creates and destroys as you scroll. Nothing to clean up, nothing to leak.
• Structural matching, not component names — a thumbnail is recognised as a link to a video at the size and shape of a picture, never as ytd-thumbnail or ytLockupViewModelContentImage. Those names differ per surface and change without notice; that shape does not. Where something has to be found inside YouTube's own UI, it is found by its ARIA role — the ⋮ menu is [role="menu"], and the row added to it is a clone of one of its own, so it inherits whatever styling that menu is wearing.
• Layered title extraction — the page's own DOM first (with selectors for the Shorts view model, which stores its title somewhere else entirely), then YouTube's oembed endpoint as a fallback. Title and channel share one memoised oembed call rather than one each, and everything is asked of the page's own origin so it works on m.youtube.com too.
• Layered type detection — the URL, then the DOM around the click, then a same-origin redirect check, memoised per video and bounded by a timeout.
• Thumbnails that cost no storage — the picture's address is built from the video id at render time (i.ytimg.com/vi/<id>/default.jpg, 120×90, a few KB), never stored. loading="lazy" inside the render window means only cards near the screen ask; the browser's HTTP cache answers every later redraw and reopening, measured at zero repeat requests. The 16:9 frame inside the 4:3 file is cropped out by object-fit: cover in a 16:9 box, so no larger size is ever fetched.
• Imports are rebuilt, never trusted — a pasted link or an imported entry is reconstructed field by field from an allow-list: the link re-parsed down to its video id and stored as the canonical watch URL, text trimmed and capped, tag colours recomputed from their names. A file can add videos; it cannot add a key, a style or a script, and it never overwrites a video already saved.
• Moves by identity, not position — a drag names the two videos by url and finds them inside the write, so a delete or an import landing between drawing the list and dropping the card cannot move the wrong one.
• Optimistic writes with a snapshot guard — every read-modify-write on the list re-reads before committing and retries on conflict, so the popup and a YouTube tab saving at the same moment cannot drop each other's changes.

Project structure

.
├── docs/               # Chrome Web Store listing copy
├── imgs/               # Logos and store promo banners — repo and listing only, not packaged
├── scripts/package.sh  # Builds the Web Store zip from an allow-list
├── fonts/              # Inter, bundled (woff2 + OFL licence) — no CDN
├── icons/              # Extension icons (48px, 128px) and button glyphs
├── sounds/             # popup-click.mp3, video-saved.mp3
├── background.js       # Service worker: opens and serialises the mini player window
├── content.js          # Saving, title extraction, type detection, backfill, HUD
├── content.css         # In-page HUD and injected button styles
├── detach.js           # Mini player window, its ways in, and the pin
├── float.html/.js      # Offscreen page the pinned video floats from
├── float-embed.js      # Inside its YouTube embed: priming, the pin, reports
├── float-embed-main.js # The embed player's own API, from the page world
├── popup.html/.css/.js # The list: thumbnails, tags, search, filters, drag reorder,
│                       # add by link, import/export, settings
├── wiki.html/.css/.js  # Built-in user guide, opened from Settings
├── url-utils.js        # Shared URL parsing and validation
├── manifest.json       # Manifest V3 configuration
└── README.md

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome — refactors, new features, or sharper selectors for YouTube's ever-changing DOM. Fork it and open a PR.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

The bundled Inter typeface is © The Inter Project Authors, licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 — see fonts/OFL.txt.

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