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Contributing

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ImprovedTube edited this page Sep 19, 2025 · 90 revisions

Spread the word

What about telling friends, or discussing here (or on reddit, twitter, quora, etc.) And please let us know if you make/made a blog-post or video about us.

Documentation

We need concise explanations with .gifs /screenshots /videos. And content for Tooltips in the app. (And invisible Tags & alternative names of the features for search, multi-language)

Translation

You can help us to translate ImprovedTube. Please, check the wiki page.

Donate

We are volunteers. ImprovedTube is made out of love for our users. Your happiness is the currency of our hearts. We dare to keep ImprovedTube open-source & free, despite it is still a lot of work, that won't stop while YouTube releases updates.

Test

You can help us by logging any bugs you find. (As a small team, prioritization is critical, so knowing which issues are impactful for many users or not can help us.)

  • BTW, you can check an extension in incognito mode ( chrome://extensions details or chrome://extensions/?id=bnomihfieiccainjcjblhegjgglakjdd) )
  • In some cases, we might compare the DOM YouTube gives you, by copying the whole <html> root element (includes all children), in the top left of Dev-Tools:
    (FireFox:)
    • (There are 2-3 different versions of this depending if you open a new window or clicked a link on YouTube. While the bug might not happen in each of these moments.)

Development

Welcome! Some inspiration: Pinned issues, labels, Roadmap, #1881 collaborative structure (more specifically), HTMLMediaElement, (to do),

Adding a feature:

  • Add a UI element in the menu

  • To add a name edit our English locale.py (at least)(other languages setting will check the English one at need).

  • Our functions usually start checking ImprovedTube.storage to check if a corresponding feature or toggle is enabled. (ImprovedTube.storage is loaded at the start of our JS)

    • We put all enabled features in every DOM to (as attributes of the element this works before the page even loaded). However this is just an option and CSS can mostly / primarily depend on JS injections, since Browsers might process CSS rules from right to left.)

  • We react to user changes of settings immediately, so that we can call the feature before the next page-reload (or possibly an introductory animation if you will (or "farewell-animation too when removing something.))

  • We have some global variables & regex

  • We observe the DOM for changes to apply features as soon as certain elements appear

  • The extension does not work with data much yet: https://github.com/LuanRT/YouTube.js/issues/976 (more specifically )

  • We have our extension popup's GUI & re-purposable functions in our little library Satus.js

  • (rare:) if your edit requires a difference in one browser: Add to our build.py.

Updating the name or value of a feature of option in our menu?: Import people's old storage!

We started labeling some discussions: Knowledge Base

Browser Extension Developer convenience (/Efficiency /Methods)

Debate:"Youtube is changing too much"

  • You might get different Youtube experiments, depending if you are logged in or not.
  • (General remedy: We always have the option to sensitively offer GUI on top of Youtube, instead of fiddling to integrate our's: CSS position:fixed or sticky)

Debate: "Predicting Youtube-DOM changes?"

The important CSS IDs (& pathes) should stay the same in all current & future YouTube.
Yet, we could predict how Youtube might be renaming some still... We can even search for new names when old ones disappear. JS regEx are efficient! Optionally extensions can apply to include files with changing names/rules in the repo or so, without requiring to have a new version approved. So we could use any language and react instantly server side. ( CSS can't do regEx, besides *= ^= $= )

  • Amounts of www.youtube.com variables' names' over time
    1. "view-source:" 2. DevTools (logged-in)

year 1. yt- 1. ytd- 2. yt- 2. ytd-
July 2025 31 62 9729 (10278) 4135 (4294)
May 2024 32 62 2387 (2468) 3115 (3175)
2024 32 63
2021 31 61
2020 24 58
2018 & 2019 700 0
2014 1400 0
2013 1 0

GitHub in general:

  • Pull Requests by command-line: gh pr create --base master --title "my PR" --body "fixing..."

    • Alternatively: hub pull-request acts as a wrapper for git) https://github.com/github/hub
      • (Or if you hate all Pull Requests, we might allow you to make commits after a few PRs)

  • Reading issues in ranked/structured/rewarding way: We can work on the top bugs, plans & wishes ordered by popularity

    • For example: The bugs on top will be most important and/or half-solved
      • also linked in our readme.md - "tidy" could be first in the ToDo-List, besides it is last in the ToDo list requiring permission and assumming new contributors reading it, while repeat-contributors tidy already. ) (You might also want to edit our Readme)

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