v3.0.0 — Non-blocking rewrite

The extension no longer slows YouTube down, never holds a response, and no longer mixes titles or channels between pages.

Fixed

Slow navigation and videos that kept loading until a hard refresh: responses are passed on immediately and patched as they stream, with no waiting on storage.
Titles and channels leaking from a previous page: aborted requests are honoured, and titles are learned only from certain id associations.
Labels such as "Up next" saved as video titles, the first video frame used as a thumbnail, and playlists/mixes pinned as videos.
The watch title changing a few seconds after load (updated_metadata).
Blurry or wrongly proportioned thumbnails: native sizes are kept, and a pinned thumbnail that no longer exists falls back to YouTube's own.


Changed

Pins now also apply to the player, the tab title, Shorts and YouTube Music (Music pins are kept separately).
Existing pins are cleaned up automatically on first run.
Least-recently-seen pins are dropped first once the store is full.
The popup shows the pin count and has a "Clear pins" button.
Plays nicely with other extensions that fetch YouTube data, e.g. YouTube Anti Translate.
Only the storage permission is needed; there is no background script.


• Patch Notes v2.4.0

Fixed occasional YouTube lag and title/thumbnail mismatches.

This update changes how the extension works internally: it now intercepts YouTube video data in the page context before YouTube renders it,
instead of relying heavily on DOM corrections after render. This makes title and thumbnail pinning more reliable and reduces unnecessary work on
dynamic YouTube pages.

Changes:

• Improved reliability for pinned titles and thumbnails.
• Reduced risk of wrong thumbnails or titles appearing on recycled YouTube cards.
• Reduced DOM fallback scanning to lower performance impact.
• Updated Chrome and Firefox store packages for version 2.4.0.

v2.3.0

• New: a toolbar menu to turn the extension on or off with a single switch.
• While off, the extension fully pauses — it stops pinning and no longer saves new titles or thumbnails.
• Turning it back on instantly re-applies your pinned titles and thumbnails on the current page.
• Your saved pins are kept while disabled, so nothing is lost.
• Added a link to the project on GitHub from the menu.

v2.2.2

Rebuilt the title/thumbnail pinning engine from the ground up. Instead of
scraping the DOM after YouTube renders (which was fragile, slow, and prone to
cross-video title leaks), the extension now intercepts YouTube's internal API
responses and pins the first-seen title and thumbnail BEFORE YouTube renders them.

• Zero DOM observers (was 5 continuous MutationObservers)
• Covers all YouTube surfaces (watch, shorts, search, home, channels, playlists,
  sidebar — anything that goes through /youtubei/v1/ is intercepted)
• In-memory pin cache removes per-frame storage reads; pin application is
  synchronous inside the network layer
• Dramatically fewer race conditions — no card recycling guards, no tentative
  gates, no generation counters
• Same privacy: everything stays in local browser storage, zero data collection

Various fixes that complement and close the issues adressed in the last update.

Fixed a case where some titles would remain in screen.
Fixed memory accumulating infinitely with an automatic cleanup and a tight limit for optimal behavior.
Removed unnecesary refreshes that did not apply to the current endopint the user is looking at.
Various performance and architecture refactors for stability and performance.

Functionality extended to also pin A/B tested thumbnails, as well as video titles. Same idea, same logic, just extended to thumbnails.