How to Block YouTube Shorts on Desktop (Feed, Search & Homepage)

#productivity #chrome #youtube #focus

You open YouTube to watch one thing, and the Shorts shelf is right there on the homepage, then again in your subscriptions feed, then again when you search. It's engineered to pull you sideways, and "I'll just watch one" turns into fifteen minutes gone.

YouTube doesn't give you a real off switch for this on desktop. Here's what you can do manually, and a cleaner way to just remove them.

What YouTube lets you do (not much)

Your built-in options are weak:

"Not interested" on a Short — it hides that one, and three more take its place.
Watch history off / pausing recommendations — thins things out but doesn't remove the Shorts shelves.
There's no setting that says "hide Shorts on desktop." That's the gap.

So manually, it's whack-a-mole. The shelves keep coming back because removing them isn't in YouTube's interest.

The cleaner way: ShortsKiller

ShortsKiller is a Chrome extension that removes YouTube Shorts from the places they show up on desktop:

Homepage — no Shorts shelf when you open YouTube
Subscriptions / feed — Shorts rows stripped out of your feed
Search results — Shorts filtered out of what you searched for

It also tracks your screen time on YouTube, so you can see the before/after — the point isn't just hiding a UI element, it's getting the minutes back.

I built this because the "just watch one" loop was the exact trap I kept falling into. Removing the shelf entirely worked where "not interested" never did — you can't tap into what isn't on the page.