When Google released a document today showing the design process for Google Chrome extensions, I thought it would be fitting to have one of the first third-party extensions for Chrome address a major shortcoming of one of Google's other products. With that thought, I give you:

TubeStop for Google Chrome

What is TubeStop? It's an add-on that stops YouTube videos from autoplaying, whether you're on YouTube.com or anywhere else on the Web. It was originally written as a Firefox add-on.

(In order to try it out, you need to be running the developer version of Chrome, and you may need to invoke it with the "--enable-extensions" flag.)

To install TubeStop, just download the tubestop.crx file linked above and drag it into Chrome. After Chrome finishes animating a download icon, TubeStop is installed. You don't even need to restart the browser; you are now free to browse the Web without the imminent threat of YouTube autoplay.

For more information on Google Chrome, check out Mahalo's Google Chrome topic page, embedded below:

I've finally uploaded TubeStop to Mozilla Add-ons, but it can't be brought out of the sandbox (protected area for untrusted extensions) until it has some reviews and undergoes an editor approval process. If you use TubeStop and find it useful, I'd appreciate it if you'd write a quick review of it over at the Mozilla Addons page for TubeStop so that I can get that process started.

The TubeStop Firefox extension that I wrote in order to stop YouTube videos from auto-playing also has the serendipitous side-effect of removing ads from YouTube videos. Since YouTube is only serving ads through the player on their main site, and not on the embeddable/syndicated player, and TubeStop works by replacing YouTube's native player with the embeddable version, you won't see any ads when you're using TubeStop.

Try it out by first viewing this video without TubeStop: Rock Yo Hips. (I recommend muting your speakers; the content of the video is terrible, but it was the first video I could find with ads.) You'll see around the 15-second mark an ad pops up over the bottom 15% of the video.

Now install TubeStop, restart Firefox, and view the video again. You'll notice that while the video still sucks, there are no ads layered on it. I don't know how long this will be the case, but it works for now.

Update: It looks like Google has removed all video ads for now. I'll update this post if I come across a video that still has them. Maybe I should rename this post to "TubeStop also stops YouTube ads... FOREVER".

If you like TubeStop, check out my other YouTube-specific Firefox extension: YouTube Comment Snob. It adds powerful filtering controls to YouTube comment threads.

I've updated the TubeStop Firefox extension to work with YouTube videos that have embedding disabled (like this one of Ben Folds covering Elton John). Since TubeStop replaces the auto-playing video with the non-auto-playing embeddable version, these videos were not being properly replaced.

You can install TubeStop from the TubeStop homepage.

What is TubeStop? It's an extension for Firefox that prevents YouTube videos from automatically playing when you open the page.

TubeStop was mentioned today on the the Global Geek Podcast, and the main drawback discussed was that it doesn't disable the autoplay on YouTube videos embedded on other sites. I've added this feature and subsequently released TubeStop 1.1.

You can install TubeStop 1.1 from the TubeStop homepage.

TubeStop is a browser extension that stops YouTube videos from automatically beginning playback when the page is loaded.

This CSV files contains the username, number of frontpage stories, number of submitted stories, number of stories dugg, and number of profile views for the top 1,000 users on Digg.

Top 1000 Diggers as of 2007/05/23

In other Digg news, the last 13 stories from this blog that have been submitted to Digg have all been buried. This includes posts about TubeStop, Twits Like Me, the Digg Top Users list, ScribeFire, and Wii-specific Web design. (Contrast this search page with this search page.) This means one of three things:

1. Everything I write is lame.
2. There is a group of Digg users specifically burying content from my site.
3. eFinke.com is on some sort of Digg blacklist and is being automatically buried by the system.

I'm leaning towards #2, but I don't know how they would track submissions from my site since the only way to do that has been broken for months.

If you'd like to be notified whenever I release a new dataset, you can subscribe to the Digg Statisical Data RSS feed, which will include only the dataset posts, or my main RSS feed, which is updated with all of my blog posts.

My latest browser extension, TubeStop, is an extension for Mozilla-based Web browsers that disables the autoplay on YouTube.com videos. This means that you can open YouTube videos in multiple tabs without them all starting to play at once.

Currently, this extension only works on videos at YouTube.com, not on YouTube videos embedded on non-YouTube.com websites with autoplay enabled.

TubeStop is compatible with Firefox 1.5 - 2.0.0.*, the latest Flock builds, and Netscape Navigator 9.0. If you're having trouble using the extension, you can either e-mail me at cfinke@gmail.com or leave a comment below.

You can install TubeStop 1.0 from the TubeStop homepage.