Transcript-First & Live Chat Guard

A browser extension for YouTube (Firefox / Zen / Chrome / Edge / Brave), MV3.

Source & issues: github.com/DarkSky7/transcript-first-guard — bug reports welcome; forks encouraged.

What it does, by default, on every watch page you open:

• Opens the video's transcript — automatically, for any video that has one.
• Closes the live-chat pane — collapsed by default on live / premiere broadcasts, so the description and transcript get the screen.

The floating control (bottom-right of the page) lets you override the defaults for the current and subsequently opened pages in the same tab:

• 🡹 / 🡻 Live Chat — click to re-show the live chat (or hide it again).
• ✕ / ↺ Transcript — click to close the transcript panel (or reopen it).

Per-page choices are remembered for the rest of that tab; a fresh tab starts from the default behaviour. The defaults themselves are switchable from the extension's popup (the puzzle icon → Transcript-First & Live Chat Guard).

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Install

Firefox / Zen: install from addons.mozilla.org (search Transcript-First & Live Chat Guard).

Chromium (Chrome/Edge/Brave/Opera) — load unpacked:

1. Download and unzip this folder (keep the folder intact).
2. Open chrome://extensions (or edge://extensions) in your browser.
3. Turn on Developer mode (top-right).
4. Click Load unpacked and select the unzipped folder (the one containing manifest.json).
5. The extension activates automatically. Open any YouTube watch page to see it work.

No accounts, no data collection, no network activity beyond YouTube itself. It only arranges elements that are already on the page.

Report a bug / contribute

• Bugs: open an issue here — the template asks for browser, version, video URL, and the on-page status line when available.
• Contributions: PRs welcome. The test/ harness runs headless (Playwright Chromium, no Playwright Firefox needed) and catches most regressions without a real browser.

Files

• manifest.json — extension manifest (MV3, includes the AMO gecko.id)
• content.js — the transcript/chat logic + floating control
• content.css, popup.html, popup.js, icons/ — styles, options UI, icons
• test/ — automated DOM-mock harness (harness.html) + Playwright tests (pw_test.py, pw_late_test.py, serve_test.py)
• community-post.md — field report: 10 traps when building YouTube extensions for Firefox
• zen-bug-report.md — upstream report draft (Zen hard-refresh video bug)

Build your own copy (optional)

No build step is required — the folder is the loadable extension. To re-create the distributable .zip on Windows:

powershell -Command "Compress-Archive -Path manifest.json,content.js,content.css,popup.html,popup.js,icons -DestinationPath youtube-transcript-guard.zip -Force"

Verify the downloaded file (MD5)

Compute the checksum of the exact file you received and compare it to the MD5 listed on the site. One line for your shell:

• Windows PowerShell

  (Get-FileHash .\youtube-transcript-guard.zip -Algorithm MD5).Hash.ToLower()
  

• Windows CMD

  certutil -hashfile youtube-transcript-guard.zip MD5
  

• Linux / macOS / Git-Bash

  md5sum youtube-transcript-guard.zip