Flowt

Chrome extension · Manifest V3

Watch what you came for.

YouTube is built to hand you a next thing. Flowt removes the parts that do the handing — the home feed, Shorts, the suggestion rail, end screens — and leaves the search box, your subscriptions and the video you actually opened.

In review at the Chrome Web Store See what it hides Chrome 111+ · free · no account

Thirteen switches, nothing hidden behind a plan

Every blocker is independent, so you keep what you use. These are the real defaults — the state Flowt is in the first time you open it.

The feed

  • Hide Home Feed
  • Hide Explore Section
  • Hide Shorts Shelf & Tab
  • Hide Shorts shelves
  • Permanently Block Shorts
  • Hide Thumbnails

The video page

  • Hide Suggested
  • Disable Autoplay
  • Hide End Screen Feed
  • Hide End Screen Cards
  • Hide Video Overlays
  • Hide Comments
  • Focus Mode

on by default off by default

The part that matters at 1 a.m.

A blocker you can switch off in one click is a suggestion. Flowt puts friction in front of the switch — and only in front of turning things off.

A PIN you set once

Turning any blocker off asks for your four-digit PIN. Turning one back on never does. The settings page is behind the same PIN, so the page where you could disable everything is not a way around it.

The PIN is stored on your device and is never included in a backup file.

Or a reason, in your own words

With accountability mode on, switching Flowt off asks you to type why. The last twenty reasons are kept on the device for you to read later.

Nobody else sees them. That is the point — the audience is you, a week from now.

Three layers, because one is not enough

YouTube renders late, re-renders on navigation, and renames its own internals without notice. A single CSS rule does not survive that.

  1. Layer 1 Stylesheet Rules keyed to attributes on the page element hide known surfaces the moment they paint, with no script in the loop and no flash of the thing you asked to remove.
  2. Layer 2 Page-context script Reads YouTube's own data objects rather than its text, so a sidebar entry is classified by what it links to, not by the word printed on it. Works the same in any interface language.
  3. Layer 3 Network rules Permanent Shorts blocking is a declarative rule in the browser itself. Navigation stops before the page loads, not after you have already seen it.

Three permissions, one site, no server

Flowt makes no network requests of any kind. There is nowhere for your data to go, because there is no backend to send it to.

PermissionUsed for
storage Keeping your switch settings, your PIN and your reason log.
declarativeNetRequestWithHostAccess The permanent Shorts block. The browser enforces the rule; Flowt never sees the requests.
scripting Starting Flowt in YouTube tabs that were already open when you installed or updated it.
https://www.youtube.com/* The only site Flowt is allowed to run on. Every other tab is out of reach.
  • No analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting.
  • No account, no sign-in, no email address.
  • No watch history read, stored or transmitted.
  • No remote code: everything that runs ships inside the extension.