Are YouTube extensions safe? SponsorBlock, Return YouTube Dislike & Enhancer for YouTube reviewed

YouTube without a couple of extensions feels broken to me now. Skip the sponsor read, get the dislike count back, slow a tutorial down to 0.75x — these are the small quality-of-life wins that make the site bearable. The catch is that anything tweaking a YouTube page has to run on that page, which means it can read it too.

So before you install the next "best YouTube extension" some listicle recommends, it's worth knowing which ones earned their access and which ones are quietly asking for the whole house. I went through the three I get asked about most — SponsorBlock, Return YouTube Dislike, and Enhancer for YouTube — and looked at exactly what each one touches.

Quick verdict

• All three are scoped to YouTube, and that's the whole point. None of them ask to read every site you visit. They request access to youtube.com (and youtube-nocookie.com) and nothing else.
• SponsorBlock and Return YouTube Dislike are open source with public code and public APIs, which is about as good as the trust story gets for an extension.
• Enhancer for YouTube is the feature-heavy option, free, and its developer states it collects no personal data — also locked to YouTube domains only.
• The real risk isn't these three — it's the clones. Search "SponsorBlock" or "YouTube dislike" in any store and you'll find copycats that ask for far more. The lesson here is how to spot the difference.

What these extensions actually do

The three solve different annoyances. SponsorBlock skips the in-video sponsor segments — the "this video is brought to you by" reads — using a crowdsourced database of timestamps that other users submit and vote on. Return YouTube Dislike puts the dislike count back on the page after YouTube hid it publicly in late 2021. Enhancer for YouTube is the kitchen-sink one: playback speed control, volume booster, ad handling, cinema mode, keyboard shortcuts.

To do any of that, each extension injects code into the YouTube page you're watching. That's the baseline cost of a YouTube extension — there's no way to rewrite the player or read the video ID without running on the page. The question that actually matters is: which pages, and what leaves your browser afterward.

Security analysis: the permission footprint

This is where these three look genuinely good. According to SponsorBlock's own project documentation, it requests access to youtube.com and www.youtube-nocookie.com — the second one is just YouTube's embed domain. It does not request <all_urls>, the "read and change all your data on all websites" grant I broke down in detail before. That single fact eliminates the entire category of "watches your banking and webmail too" risk.

Return YouTube Dislike works the same way: it needs to run on YouTube to inject the count it pulls from its API, and that's the scope it asks for. Enhancer for YouTube, per its Chrome Web Store listing, lists host access as *://www.youtube.com/* plus the nocookie embed domain — again, no all-sites grant.

Contrast that with the tabs permission, which logs every URL you open across the whole browser. I went through what that exposes in my piece on the tabs permission, and the takeaway applies here: a YouTube extension has no business requesting it. If a "YouTube" extension asks for all-sites access or tab history, that's your cue to close the tab.

How the data actually flows

Permissions tell you what an extension can touch. What it sends matters just as much, and this is where open source pays off.

SponsorBlock generates a random user ID locally when you install it, and that ID is what it uses to submit or vote on sponsor segments. There's no account, no email. Because the code is public on GitHub, anyone can verify that the network calls go to the SponsorBlock API and carry segment data, not your identity.

Return YouTube Dislike queries its public API (returnyoutubedislikeapi.com) for the dislike count of whatever video you're on. Per the project's privacy stance, it doesn't access your YouTube account, and votes collected from extension users are stored against anonymous IDs rather than anything that identifies you. The source is also public, so the claim is auditable rather than just promised.

Enhancer for YouTube is the one to read more carefully, only because it's the most feature-rich and closed-source comparison point of the three. Its developer states the extension doesn't collect personal data and keeps everything scoped to YouTube. That's a reasonable position for a tool that runs entirely on the page — but with a closed-source extension you're trusting the policy rather than reading the code, which is the standing tradeoff I keep flagging in my breakdown of extension privacy policies.

Privacy breakdown: how I'd score them

I'm not going to slap a fake number on any of these — go pull the live security report and judge with your own eyes. But the privacy axis is unusually clean for this category, so here's how I rank them.

SponsorBlock and Return YouTube Dislike sit at the top together. Open code, narrow permissions, anonymous IDs, public APIs you can inspect. As of 2026 they're also huge — Return YouTube Dislike reports over 5 million users, and SponsorBlock counts roughly 2 million on Chrome plus several hundred thousand on Firefox. Scale plus transparency is a good combination, because a lot of eyes are on that public code.

Enhancer for YouTube lands just behind, and only because of the closed-source caveat — not because of anything it does wrong. It's a long-running, well-rated extension (around 590,000 Chrome users at a 4.6 rating) with a stated no-collection policy and YouTube-only scope. If you want the deep feature set, it's a defensible pick. I'd just keep it updated and re-check its permissions after big version bumps.

The clones are the actual threat

Here's the part that should stick. None of the three extensions above are the problem. The problem is that popular tools get cloned, and the clone is where the risk lives.

Copycats ride a trusted name, then quietly request broader access — all-sites host permissions, tab history, or scripting that reaches well past YouTube. And popular extensions change hands, too. A clean tool with a big install base is an attractive acquisition target, and a new owner inherits every permission and every user — the exact pattern behind the ownership-transfer hijacks I've covered.

So three checks before you install any YouTube extension:

1. Confirm the publisher. Install SponsorBlock from sponsor.ajay.app's links, Return YouTube Dislike from returnyoutubedislike.com, Enhancer for YouTube from mrfdev.com. Don't trust the first store result.
2. Read the permissions. A real YouTube extension wants youtube.com. If it wants all sites or your tabs, walk away.
3. Prefer open source when it exists. For SponsorBlock and Return YouTube Dislike, you don't have to take anyone's word — the code is right there.

Alternatives worth a look

If you want fewer extensions doing more, a few options overlap with these. NewPipe and FreeTube (desktop/mobile apps, not extensions) bundle SponsorBlock-style skipping natively, so you don't add browser surface area at all. For dislikes, the count is genuinely gone from YouTube's API — every solution is an estimate built on archived and crowdsourced data, so don't expect perfect numbers from any of them.

And if you're already running five YouTube extensions, the most useful move isn't adding a sixth — it's auditing the ones you forgot about.

Final recommendation

For most people: SponsorBlock and Return YouTube Dislike are easy yeses — narrow, open, and exactly what they claim to be. Add Enhancer for YouTube if you want the heavy feature set and you're comfortable trusting a closed-source (but well-established) tool that stays on YouTube.

The bigger habit is the one worth keeping: check the scope before you install, and re-check it on the extensions you already have. You can pull the permission and privacy breakdown for any of these — and any clone pretending to be them — in the Extenshi catalog. See the full security report → before you trust anything that runs on your video feed.

A few common questions

What's the best YouTube extension for Chrome? There's no single winner — it depends on the annoyance you're fixing. For skipping sponsor reads, SponsorBlock. For the dislike count, Return YouTube Dislike. For speed control, volume, and cinema mode, Enhancer for YouTube. All three are YouTube-scoped, which matters more than any "best of" listicle ranking.

Is there a YouTube extension to remove Shorts or recommendations? Yes — several do it, and Enhancer for YouTube covers a lot of that feed-tidying ground on its own. The rule is the same as everywhere else here: a feed-cleaning extension still only needs youtube.com. If one asks for all-sites access to hide Shorts, that's a mismatch worth questioning.

Do these YouTube extensions work on Firefox? SponsorBlock and Return YouTube Dislike both ship Firefox builds, and Enhancer for YouTube has a Firefox version too. Whatever browser you're on, check the publisher and the permission scope the same way before installing.

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This article is based on publicly available information from the extensions' own developers, store listings, and source repositories. Extenshi does not independently verify all claims made by third-party developers. References to specific extensions reflect their publicly stated practices and do not constitute accusations of wrongdoing. If you believe any information is inaccurate, please contact us at [email protected].