YouTube is being taken over by Shorts—the company's answer to TikTok and Instagram Reels. YouTube Shorts are vertical, has a different user interface, are harder to embed, and YouTube is aggressively pushing them across user feeds. Users have also complained that YouTube automatically converts their shorter videos to the Shorts format, making it more difficult for people to upload clips and share them with friends.
If you don't like YouTube Shorts, there are a few ways to make those videos more watchable. Alternatively, you can get rid of YouTube Shorts entirely by using one of these Chrome extensions.
For browsing YouTube on desktop, an extension can easily change any Shorts video to a normal one. I tested YouTube Enhancer, which is available for Firefox, Chrome, and any Chromium browsers such as Edge, Vivaldi, or Opera. Once the extension is installed, you can click its toolbar icon and scroll down to the section labelled Appearance and select Convert Shorts. When you click any YouTube Shorts video, it'll automatically play in the regular YouTube player.
You can easily change any YouTube Shorts video to a regular one yourself by modifying the URL. YouTube Shorts have a URL that looks like this: youtube.com/shorts/video-id-goes-here. Change shorts to v, and YouTube will load it in its normal video player. The modified URL should look like this: youtube.com/v/video-id-goes-here.
This tip comes via tech journalist Jared Newman, who mentions a JavaScript bookmark that gets the job done. You can add the following bookmark to your browser.
Whenever you load a Shorts video, you can click the bookmark to play it in YouTube's regular video player.
As for mobile apps, one suggestion to switch to YouTube's normal video player is to "Like" the Shorts version of the video, and then it'll show up in your Liked Videos playlist. Loading it from your Liked Videos feed will open the video in the normal YouTube player, which might not work perfectly, but it's a hack to try.
