Improve Your YouTube Watching Experience with These 7 Extensions

While YouTube constantly updates its web interface, you can still improve and optimize your YouTube it by using a few add-ons and extensions to customize your video watching and searching experience. We know what its like having to sift through dozens of pages to hunt down the download locations of the best extensions, apps or add-ons for a specific purpose.

If your goal today is to get more out of your YouTube watching and listening experience, then the following list of the top 7 extensions and add-ons for YouTube should guide you in the right direction:

Note: None of the extensions below will allow you to download content from YouTube – this is illegal and against YouTube's TOS. All of these extensions/add-ons will improve your experience with YouTube.

Without further delay, here are the top 7 YouTube extensions, starting with the most popular extensions that support multiple browsers and leading into the extensions for Chrome only:

1. Magic Actions

Magic Actions is a versatile and powerful browser extension that is available for the Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. The plugin lets you watch YouTube in your own way with customizable backlight feature that comes with more than 40 color presets. You also get access to Auto Cinema mode, which automatically adjusts every video you play to the largest size possible for your display. Auto HD mode automatically sets every YouTube video you play to HD (or the highest available resolution). You also get video looping, explained in detail in our guide How to Auto Replay a YouTube video on Chrome, Firefox, Opera.

2. Turn Off the Lights

Turn Off the Lights is a simple yet powerful aesthetic improvement YouTube extension that is compatible with most major browsers including Firefox, Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Maxthon, and even Yandex.

3. Tubalr

Tubalr is actually a free site that lets you quickly organize music videos from YouTube into specific genres and automatically create fine-tuned playlists based on your musical preferences. It is basically a way to use YouTube as a free internet radio or automated music television show. Being that this is an online service it is compatible with every browser that can access a website.

4. Video Pinner

Ever get tired of not being able to continue watching the video that is playing while scrolling down to read the comments and see other related videos? Well this problem has been solved by Video Pinner, a Chrome and Firefox extension that makes sure your YouTube video is pinned in the middle of the screen no matter where on the page you scroll, so you'll be able to see all the comments without missing one second of video.

5. Mini Player

Mini Player is a Google Chrome extension that lets you view YouTube videos in a miniature video that you can drag around your browser window while you freely browse other tabs. With so much to do on the internet why be trapped on YouTube.com just because you want to watch a YouTube video? Use Mini Player to watch your YouTube videos in the background of all your other browsing activity. This player will also work this way for Facebook and Vimeo videos.

6. Playjack

Playjack is the perfect Chrome extension to install if you like watching YouTube on your television. This add-on transforms the visual interface of YouTube to make texts larger and give videos more cinematic thumbnails, previews, and descriptions. The video recommendation and playlist creation features are also noteworthy.

7. Jiffy

Jiffy is a handy little extension/tool lets you quickly and easily make .GIF moving images out of a specific section of a YouTube video. Once again this is a Chrome extension, so if you're a YouTube fan and you haven't yet downloaded and started using Chrome then you're definitely missing out. There is another extension for Firefox called Jiffy, but it does something completely different.