alt Hacker NewsShow HN: A Chrome extension to give you back control over short-form videos
Hi HN! I built this little extension to prevent, in my opinion, the most offensive anti-pattern used by tech companies. That is removing the seek bar in short-form videos.
The "seek bar" is the bar at the bottom of a video that progresses as you play the video, and that you can click on or drag to skip around. Why companies ever thought it was a good idea to get rid of this I don't know, but I find it infuriating, so I decided to add it back for myself and thought others might like it too.
ReelControl adds a progress bar and seeking capabilities to videos on Instagram, YouTube Shorts, and Facebook Reels.
I do sometimes enjoy watching short-form content and I've found that with this extension enabled I can be more mindful about it and get sucked in way less. I'm also on my phone less because I tend to favor the web versions of these platforms now.
Open source--PRs and issues welcome! https://github.com/darajava/seek-anywhere/
Comments
For youtube shorts, replacing the "shorts" in URL with "watch" will give you the usual interface, for example:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GqkmtcirwYA -> https://www.youtube.com/watch/GqkmtcirwYA
But actually I see that seek bar is already available in youtube shorts. Maybe it's a recent change?
It's horrible that the web has come to this, a need for a browser hack to restore the UI that some website hacked off.
An answer to my wishes ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43398696 thank you!
I wrote a set of uBo rules to do the same on TikTok. Not sure if they still work, but might as well publish it:
tiktok.com##sharing-main-video-el:watch-attr(controlslist):remove-attr(controlslist)
It seems a bit flakey on mobile, but it was a nice addition to the other enhancements. I haven't been able to make the mobile web as useful as the desktop web version, but didn't want to spend too much time on it either.
That looks pretty useful. A Firefox release would be most appreciated.
Thanks for releasing it! Whats the chance of this getting shipped to Firefox users? A future improvement might be to add the ability to change the playback speed :)
Thanks for this. I've thought about building this exact thing ever since this vicious trend began.
is there a way to "save" a volume for instagram/youtube? i swear their volume is boosted to 200% volume
I haven't tried this out but if it works it's one the biggest bang for the buck I've seen on HN. Thanks!
Nice. Does this do more than the "Show Video Controls by Default" extension? https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/show-video-controls...
Adding a progress bar back might cause people to just skip to the part they want to see instead of watching the whole thing again though, and I'm worried that might not be in the best interests of the content creator or advertisers.
Thanks for sharing! Also, would you mind adding a license to your gh repo?
Instant download. Works great. Perhaps on Instagram you can make it save the audio level when the video is muted? If I mute a video then scroll to the next one, the audio still plays. Otherwise, thanks for making this, it's something I've wanted for a long time.
For anyone looking: Safari has "Stop The Madness" which has something similar (and much more).
Been using this extension to turn shorts back into regular videos for years: https://github.com/raven0230/Remove-Youtube-Shorts
That way not only do you get the seek/pause controls back, but other stuff like volume, comments, keyboard shortcuts etc. now work as usual too.
I have a simple bookmarklet does does something similar:
It just re-enables all controls on all <video> elements and uses z-indexing to push them to the top. Works on instagram but needs to be re-ran for new video elements.