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How to block YouTube Shorts on desktop

By Adnan · · 5 min read

YouTube Shorts are built to keep you scrolling, and on a computer they show up on the home page, in search and in the sidebar. YouTube has no switch to turn them off for good, but you can get close. Here are three ways, from lightest to strongest.

1. Use YouTube's own "Show fewer" option

On the YouTube home page, find the Shorts shelf, click the three dots or the × next to it, and choose Not interested or Show fewer Shorts.

It costs nothing and needs no install, but it is a hint, not a block. The shelf tends to come back after a while, and Shorts still appear in search results and on channel pages.

2. Hide Shorts with an extension

Several extensions hide Shorts by removing the parts of the YouTube page that show them. A popular one is Unhook, which has a "Hide Shorts" switch and can also hide recommendations and autoplay. The steps are the same for most of them:

  1. Install the extension from the Chrome Web Store. (Brave uses the same store.)
  2. Click its icon in the toolbar.
  3. Turn on the option to hide Shorts. Leave the other options off until you know you want them; some hide the whole home feed.

This works well for YouTube. It doesn't cover Instagram Reels, TikTok or other short-video feeds, and because YouTube changes its page often, these tools sometimes need an update before they work again.

3. Block Shorts and other short-video feeds

If the problem is short videos in general rather than YouTube alone, a blocker that covers several sites is simpler than one extension per site.

WebWell (the extension I make) has a Short videos switch in its Protect page. It blocks YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, TikTok, Facebook Reels and Snapchat Spotlight, while regular YouTube videos keep working. You can choose which of those sites to include.

  1. Install WebWell on Chrome or Brave.
  2. Open the dashboard from the toolbar icon and go to Protect.
  3. Turn on Short videos and tick the sites you want covered.
  4. The browser asks for permission to access sites. WebWell only asks at this point, because it needs it to hide the feeds; it doesn't read or store page content.

If you want an extra nudge on other sites, its mindful pause asks you to take a few breaths before a distracting site opens, and a parent PIN stops the settings being switched off on a shared computer.

Before you install anything

Any extension that changes YouTube needs permission to read and change the page, so pick carefully:

  • Check the number of users and recent reviews on the store page.
  • Read what the developer says about data. A blocker has no reason to send your browsing anywhere.
  • Prefer extensions that are open source, or whose privacy policy is specific rather than vague.
  • Remove extensions you no longer use. Fewer extensions means fewer things that can go wrong.