FocusTube
Support

Something not working?

Start with the first one. It fixes most cases and takes a second to check.

Nothing is being hidden

Almost always one of these four, in this order.

  1. If you just installed or updated it, reload the YouTube tabs you already had open

    Chrome only runs an extension on pages opened after it was installed, so a YouTube tab that was already open has no FocusTube in it at all until you reload. The same applies right after the extension updates.

    Once it is running you do not need to keep reloading: switching something on or off takes effect on open tabs straight away.

  2. Check the mode is not Off

    Open the popup and look at the Mode tab. On Off, everything on YouTube shows on purpose, no matter what is switched on in Settings. Settings decide what gets hidden; Mode decides when that applies.

  3. On Timer, check a session is actually running

    This one catches people out. Choosing Timer does not start anything by itself — it only means "hide things while a focus session is running". Until you press start, no session is running, so nothing is hidden and the extension looks broken.

    Either start a session, or switch the mode to Always if you want your settings to apply all the time.

  4. On Schedule, check you are inside one of your windows

    Same idea. A schedule only applies on the days and times you set, so outside those windows YouTube is deliberately left alone. If it is Saturday and your schedule covers weekdays, nothing will be hidden — that is it working as configured.

If you just want it on permanently and never want to think about this again, set the mode to Always.

A setting used to work and suddenly stopped

YouTube changes its own page structure fairly often, and a change on their side can stop one of the toggles from finding what it is meant to hide. This is the most likely cause when a single feature breaks while the rest keep working.

It is worth reporting rather than waiting — these are usually quick to fix once someone knows which part of YouTube changed. Include what you were looking at and which toggle stopped working.

Report it on GitHub

You want the normal YouTube back for a bit

You do not have to uninstall or switch anything off one by one. Open the popup, go to Mode, and choose Off. Everything on YouTube shows again, and all your settings and blocklists stay exactly as you left them for when you switch back.

What FocusTube can see

It runs only on YouTube pages, and asks for two permissions: storage, to remember your settings, and alarms, for Focus Mode timers and schedules. There is no account, nothing is sent anywhere, and nothing about your browsing is collected.

The whole extension is open source, so this is checkable rather than a promise — read the code.

Still stuck

Open an issue on GitHub and describe what you expected and what happened instead. Mentioning your browser version and whether you are on Windows, macOS or Linux usually saves a round trip.

Open an issue