hvOS

A performance-obsessed interface overhaul for desktop YouTube on Firefox. hvOS strips YouTube of its heavy stock UI overhead and reconstructs the viewing experience with Apple TV-inspired minimalism, deep ambient mesh backdrops, an expanding focus search engine, and telemetry elimination for sub-second page loads.

Developed by @hv33y.

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What hvOS Does to YouTube

YouTube Interface Reconstruction

• Cinematic Ambient Aura: Injects a deep, multi-layered mesh gradient behind the entire YouTube feed with subtle organic motion.
• Apple TV Glass Masthead: Replaces YouTube's static top bar with a translucent frosted-glass header featuring real-time scroll blur.
• Windows 11 Expanding Search Pill: A compact search pill that smoothly stretches into a focused search bar on click, dimming and blurring underlying video cards.
• Strict 4-Column Card Grid: Enforces a clean 4-column feed layout with 3D elevations, specular glass borders, and focused ambient glows on hover.
• Streamlined Video Metadata: Consolidates channel information and view counts into a single row while stripping upload timestamps.

YouTube Clutter Stripping

• Removes the left sidebar drawer, mini-guide, and hamburger menu.
• Removes the "+ Create" button, notification bell, and voice search mic.
• Eliminates category chip bars, ghost headers, Shorts shelves, and suggested end-screen annotations.

Firefox Turbo Engine

• Intercepts and drops YouTube background telemetry, analytics, and tracking requests (/log_event, /api/stats/*, google-analytics.com).
• Eliminates skeleton loading placeholders and background video hover decoders.
• Disables YouTube canvas cinematics to maintain smooth 60 FPS WebRender GPU composite performance.
• Blocks and cleans ?themeRefresh=1 reload loops.

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Installation

Works on both Firefox and Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Brave, Edge).

Option 1: Automatic Install (Recommended)

1. Ensure Tampermonkey is installed on your browser.
2. Click Install hvOS.
3. Tampermonkey will open an installation tab. Click Install.
4. Navigate to YouTube.

Option 2: Manual Install

1. Install Tampermonkey for your browser.
2. Click the Tampermonkey extension icon and choose Create a new script...
3. Copy the raw contents of hvos.user.js.
4. Paste the code into the Tampermonkey editor, overwriting any template text.
5. Save the script (Ctrl + S or Cmd + S) and reload YouTube.

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License

MIT