Google's been late to the party, as it launched YouTube Shorts globally in mid-2021. YouTube Shorts is accessible via YouTube's main menu on desktop and mobile platforms. While the vertical video format may make sense on mobile devices, Google decided to use the same format on the desktop.
The mobile format offers limited controls when it comes to playing videos on the YouTube website. It has a pause and mute buttons, options to share, like or dislike, and to read and write comments, but that is about it.
Compared to the standard desktop player on YouTube, the Shorts video player is lacking options to change the quality of the video, the video format, or playback speed. There is no option to play videos in fullscreen mode or to change the volume of sound, other than muting sound altogether.
Youtube-shorts block is a browser extension for
Mozilla Firefox and
Google Chrome that changes that. The extension is compatible with other browsers based on Firefox and Chromium.
The main thing that it adds to YouTube is the ability to play YouTube shorts in the main video player. Users get all controls of the main video player when they watch short videos on YouTube.
The extension works directly after installation. A click on its icon displays a toggle to turn the redirection to YouTube's main video player off. Additional options, to hide the Shorts tab and videos, are displayed when you click on the three-dots in the extension interface.
The only downside to using the extension is that you can't browse the Shorts section anymore on YouTube. When you click on Shorts, the first video is loaded automatically by the extension.
