FeedCleaner is now PUBLISHED!

Feed Cleaner is now PUBLIC on Firefox!!! You can download directly from Firefox here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feedcleaner/

--- README BELOW ---

• Watched Video Filter: tracks videos you've watched, or videos you have repeatedly seen in the YouTube home feed, then hides their cards after a configurable threshold (default 80%). It filters the home feed, search results, watch-page sidebar, and channel pages, but always leaves the YouTube History page untouched. You can configure a placeholder instead of hiding repeat videos outright.
• Repeat Video Fixer: counts how often a card has been in your viewport (≥50% visible, once per page visit) and hides videos that keep reappearing unwatched — after 1 prior sighting by default, configurable in settings. Click either threshold value to type an exact number, including one above the slider's default range. Hide decisions use sighting counts snapshotted at navigation time, so a card never vanishes while you're looking at it.
• Link cleaner: strips tracking parameters (si=, feature=, pp=, utm_*, …) from YouTube links you copy on the page and from the share dialog. Functional params (v, t, list) are never touched.
• Feed cleanup filters: hide Shorts (shelves + cards), Mix/algorithmic playlist cards, live streams, premieres, videos shorter than N seconds, blocked channels (handle or display name), and title keyword/regex matches. Rule-hidden cards get a placeholder with a per-page-session "Show anyway".
• Auto-purge: forget watched/seen entries older than N days (1–365) so the dedupe list can't grow forever.
• "Are you still watching?" bypass (opt-in, off by default): answers YouTube's "Video paused. Continue watching?" and YouTube Music's "Are you still there?" inactivity dialogs by clicking Continue, exactly as a user would — no preemptive event tampering. Mind the trade-off: playback keeps running when you walk away (bandwidth/battery).
• Telemetry-beacon blocker (opt-in, off by default): a small static declarativeNetRequest ruleset (dnr/yt-beacons.json) blocks YouTube's playback/interaction telemetry (log_event, qoe, atr, ptracking, gen_204, api/stats/ads…). Watch-history reporting (api/stats/watchtime) is deliberately NOT blocked so your own YouTube history keeps working.

Zero telemetry. Zero runtime network requests. All data in browser.storage.local, exportable/importable as a single JSON backup (settings + watched list with dates + sighting counts).

YouTube Music policy

music.youtube.com is covered for privacy features only:

• Active there: link cleaning, the opt-in telemetry-beacon blocker, and the "Are you still watching?" bypass.
• Never active there: feed filtering and watch tracking. Listening to a song on YouTube Music does not mark the matching video watched on YouTube, and no card is ever hidden on YouTube Music.
• This is enforced in code (IS_YOUTUBE_MUSIC in content/shared.js; the feed and player modules exit early on that host) rather than by trusting desktop selectors to never match YouTube Music markup, and pinned by tests/ytm-policy.test.mjs.

The extension in action on the youtube home page

Even blocks shorts

Example with no placeholder banners

Permissions — why each one is requested

Permission	Why
storage	Watched-video map and settings in storage.local; the session hidden-counter in storage.session.
clipboardWrite	The share dialog's Copy button copies from YouTube's internal data model, not the visible input — this lets the link cleaner overwrite the clipboard with the cleaned URL right after. Only used inside that click flow.
declarativeNetRequest	The opt-in telemetry-beacon ruleset (dnr/yt-beacons.json, 9 static rules scoped to youtube.com + music.youtube.com initiators, disabled by default). No dynamic rules, no other sites.
host_permissions (youtube.com)	Scoped strictly to YouTube and YouTube Music domains to allow continuous feed filtering without requiring click-to-run activation.

Note on Firefox Permissions ("Always Allow on YouTube")

In modern Firefox (Manifest V3), extensions default to "Only When Clicked" for your security until site access is approved.

This means you can use FeedCleaner in two ways:

• On-Demand: Click the FeedCleaner icon on your toolbar whenever you visit YouTube to activate filtering for that session.
• Always-On (Recommended): If you want FeedCleaner to automatically filter watched videos the moment YouTube opens without needing a click:
  1. Right-click the FeedCleaner icon on YouTube and select "Always Allow on www.youtube.com", OR
  2. Open the FeedCleaner Settings page and click "Check / Grant Access".

m.youtube.com is deliberately not matched. The mobile site builds its feed from ytm-* custom elements and this codebase only knows the desktop ytd-* / yt-lockup-view-model shapes, so injecting there bought nothing but an extra origin. Supporting mobile means adding mobile selectors to content/shared.js first, then re-adding the match — not the other way round.

Architecture

content/shared.js          all YouTube DOM assumptions (selectors, ID parsing,
                           card metadata extraction, URL cleaning)
content/url-privacy.js     copy/share tracking-param stripping
content/youtube-player.js  timeupdate watch tracking + SPA nav re-attachment
content/youtube-feed.js    MutationObserver → idle-batched card filtering
content/still-watching.js  opt-in "Are you still watching?" auto-dismisser
background/service-worker.js  message hub; the ONLY writer of storage;
                           auto-purge; DNR ruleset toggle
dnr/yt-beacons.json        opt-in telemetry-blocking ruleset (static, packaged)
popup/, settings/          UI; talk to background via messages
build/convert-filters.js   build-time ABP/uBO → DNR converter (Module B)

Message flow: content scripts send VIDEO_PROGRESS / GET_WATCHED_IDS / CARDS_HIDDEN / SEEN_BATCH / RESET_SEEN; UI pages send GET_STATE / SET_SETTINGS / UNWATCH / CLEAR_WATCHED / IMPORT_WATCHED / CLEAR_SEEN / GET_BACKUP / IMPORT_BACKUP. Content scripts cache the watched-ID set locally and refresh it via read-only storage.onChanged plus a 30 s fallback poll — they never write storage directly.

Storage shapes: watched is { videoId: watchedAtMs } (0.3.0 migrated the old watchedIds string array in onInstalled; timestamps power the auto-purge). seenCounts is { videoId: [count, lastSeenMs] }.

Privacy

• No external requests at runtime — filter lists convert at build time.
• No eval, no remote code; CSP locks extension pages to 'self'.
• Export/Import of the watched list is a local JSON file, no cloud.
• Private browsing leaves no trace: if you enable the extension in private windows, filtering still works there, but watch progress and feed sightings from private tabs are never recorded (the background drops VIDEO_PROGRESS / SEEN_BATCH from incognito senders).
• Copied/shared YouTube links are cleaned of tracking params by default (disclosed in the AMO description; toggle in settings).
• Optional auto-purge forgets watched/seen entries older than N days.
• The telemetry-beacon blocker is opt-in and ships disabled; its ruleset is static, human-readable, and scoped to requests initiated by YouTube's own domains (youtube.com / music.youtube.com).

License

MPL-2.0.