Open Short

v1.0.0 Functionality & UI Coming soon

Open YouTube Shorts in the regular watch player — no extra clicks, no copy/paste, no new tabs.

Coming to Chrome Web Store Privacy Policy

Why?

YouTube Shorts is great for discovery, but the Shorts player strips out features you get on a regular watch page: the seekable timeline, playback speed, theatre mode, mini-player, captions, and quality settings.

Open Short bridges the two. Keep scrolling Shorts. When you find something you actually want to watch properly, click one button and the same video opens in YouTube’s standard watch player — same tab, same video, full controls.

How it works

The extension adds a small button to the top of the Shorts action rail (above the Like, Dislike, Comment, Share, and Remix buttons). Clicking it rewrites the page URL from youtube.com/shorts/{id} to youtube.com/watch?v={id} and reloads in the same tab.

That’s the entire extension. No background processing, no analytics on your viewing, no surprise side effects.

Features

One-click switch from Shorts to the regular YouTube watch player
Same tab — no new windows or pop-ups
Automatic — works on every Shorts page, no setup required
Tiny footprint — no settings, no popup, no background activity
Privacy-friendly — only runs on youtube.com/shorts/* URLs
No tracking of what you watch or how you use YouTube

What it doesn't do

Track what you watch on YouTube
Read or modify any page outside YouTube Shorts
Require an account, login, or sign-up
Run on any URL other than youtube.com/shorts/*

Permissions

Every permission this extension asks for, and why it needs it.

https://www.youtube.com/*

Required so the content script can inject the button into the YouTube Shorts action rail and rewrite the URL when clicked. The script only runs on /shorts/* paths.

Privacy first

Open Short doesn't track what you watch. It sends a single anonymous install ping with the extension version, and nothing else.

Read the privacy policy →

Support

Need help with Open Short, found a bug, or have a feature request? Get in touch and we'll get back to you.

[email protected]