youtube-view-history

YouTube Watch History Pro

Automatically logs every YouTube video you see — feed, search, channel, Shorts, watch-next sidebar — so you can find them later. 100% local, no tracking.

What it does

YouTube’s own history only records videos you clicked on. This extension logs every video that actually appeared in front of you — in the home feed, search results, on a creator’s channel, as a watch-next suggestion, or while scrolling Shorts. No more “I swear I saw a video about X last week.”

Browse YouTube normally. Click the extension icon to see the grid. Search by title or channel, filter by where the video came from, click a thumbnail to open it in a new tab.

Features

• Automatic capture from home / search / channel / watch-next / Shorts / subscriptions
• Source badge on every tile — you can tell at a glance where each video came from
• Search by title or channel
• Filter by source (All / Home / Search / Channel / Watch-next / Shorts)
• Shorts rendered as 9:16 vertical tiles, long-form videos as 16:9
• Delete individual items or clear all
• JSON export of full history
• 100% local — no account, no server, no analytics

Privacy

No data leaves your device. Ever.

All history is stored locally using chrome.storage.local. The extension makes zero outbound network requests. Uninstalling removes everything.

See privacy-policy.md for details.

Install

Until the extension is live on the Chrome Web Store, you can load it manually:

1. Clone or download this repo
2. Open chrome://extensions
3. Enable “Developer mode”
4. Click “Load unpacked” → select this folder

How it works

• src/injector.js runs at document_start on youtube.com and injects src/interceptor.js into the page’s own JS context.
• interceptor.js does two things:
  1. Reads window.ytInitialData on DOM-ready and on every SPA navigation, extracting video entries from the embedded renderer tree.
  2. Monkey-patches window.fetch so continuation responses from youtubei/v1/browse, /search, /next, /reel, /player are also parsed.
• Parser in src/lib/parser.js walks the nested renderer tree and normalizes four shapes observed in real YouTube responses: videoRenderer, gridVideoRenderer, lockupViewModel (new watch-next shape), and shortsLockupViewModel.
• Service worker in src/background.js dedupes by videoId, caps at 10 000, writes to chrome.storage.local.

No bundler, no runtime dependencies. Plain JS. MV3. npm test runs Node’s built-in test runner against three real captured ytInitialData fixtures (search results, channel page, watch page).

Known limitations

YouTube’s data shape evolves. The parser handles four renderer types observed on 2026-04-17, but YouTube may introduce new shapes over time. If detection breaks on a specific page, file an issue with the page URL.

The home feed on logged-out users is lazy-loaded and may return empty on first popup. Logged-in users get immediate results.

Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

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