ridium is an open source browser extension for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox that gives you more control on YouTube.

YouTube gives users only a handful of customization options and many of those are not remembered over sessions or when you don't sign in to an account.

Iridium is a well-designed browser extension that gives you dozens of customization options, from setting the default video quality to remembering the volume level or enabling loudless normalization.

Note: Iridium has nothing to do with the privacy-focused Chromium version that is also called Iridium.

Iridium

Iridium requests access to YouTube's domain only and does not request any other permissions. The extension adds an icon to the browser's toolbar; activation opens the settings of the extension so that you can start configuring YouTube to your liking right after installation.

Settings are divided into the four sections general, video, settings and donate. General controls only a handful of settings but they are quite useful nevertheless, and Video is the section that holds most of the options.

You can set the default channel tab (Home, Videos, Playlists, Channels, Discussions, or About) there, control the blacklist, or enable audio playback when you hover the mouse over a video thumbnail and press the Shift-key on the keyboard.

Video controls most of the available preferences. You may have seen most of the settings in other YouTube extensions for Firefox or Chrome but Iridium supports some that appear to be unique.

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You can set the preferred video quality to all supported quality levels (between 144p and 8k) and make sure that features that the extension enables by default are set correctly.

Iridium remembers the default player size and player volume by default, makes sure that player shortcuts are active all the time, and enables support for HFR streams.

Other features are disabled by default. The extension blocks annotations and subtitles by default, and makes sure that videos don't play automatically either. Comments are not displayed but hidden.

You have full control over all features and may toggle them at any time in the configuration.

Iridium supports a handful of interesting features that are rare or unique. The extension blocks advertisement by default but you may enable ads on channels that you are subscribed to; useful if you want to support creators this way.

The extension displays the video in a smaller overlay when you scroll down so that it remains visible all the time; handy as well if you like to browse comments while watching videos.

Last but not least, you may enable the modified locale feature to set YouTube to a specific locale.

All supported features are explained on the project's GitHub page. A click on the question mark icon next to a setting opens its description on GitHub so that you know what it does.

Iridium displays controls on Youtube directly next to that. When you hover over video thumbnails you get options to block the channels that published the video by clicking on the x-icon that is displayed, and to play the video in a popup.

Closing Words

Iridium is a powerful browser extension for YouTube that gives you more control over videos and other features of the site. While you may need to go through the configuration on first start to make sure everything is set up the way you want it, it is pretty straightforward and you get explanations in case you don't know exactly what a feature does.