FreeTube

title: FreeTube
published: 2025-02-20

YouTube is one of the services I wasn’t able to abandon, as of yet. Too many people still upload their content there, instead of aiming for more independent and free platforms. I admit though, that hosting lots of videos just costs a lot of money. However, browsing YouTube has always been a nuisance for me.

I’m using LibreWolf as daily browser, with uBlockOrigin running in medium mode, blocking all 3rd-party scripts and frames by default. I manually allow individual requests whenever I feel good with the compromise. So out of the box on YouTube nothing works. Even if I allow requests to another server, it happens that a video stops after 60 seconds or I have to reload the page multiple times, but I’m also unwilling to allow all the trillion requests to several google servers.

https://librewolf.net https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium-mode

I found FreeTube only yesterday, but it seems to offer all the settings I was missing. Among other things, I can choose (and did so) to

• disable search suggestions
• disable subtitles by default (YouTube did weird things on that end)
• not autoplay anything
• not fetch any feeds or blog posts automatically
• hide everything I don’t care about (trending/popular videos etc)
• even Display Titles Without Excessive Capitalisation And Punctuation
• not remember any watch or search history
• use my local Tor service as SOCKS5 proxy

https://freetubeapp.io

Of course there are plenty of further settings for theming, localization etc., I can even set an external video player or configure parental control to show family friendly content only (and I can set a password).

It is a really nice bandwidth of settings and I’m thankful for that!

P.S.

I did a little testing whether my CPU also is less stressed using the Flatpak FreeTube app, because I had the feeling that watching YouTube from the browser regularly drives my laptop temperature to a maximum. However, the numbers from top don’t give any significant differences:

    PID USER      %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND        
  12270 schubis+  40.5   2.2   0:40.80 Isolated Web Co
  12089 schubis+  37.5   2.6   0:34.30 librewolf      

    PID USER      %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND        
  16415 rschube+  44.0   2.5   0:20.77 librewolf      
  16601 rschube+  42.4   2.7   0:28.71 Isolated Web Co

idle with mouse movement

    PID USER      %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND        
  16601 rschube+  44.0   2.3   0:46.32 Isolated Web Co
  16415 rschube+  34.1   2.3   0:33.90 librewolf      

idle no mouse movement

    PID USER      %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND        
  16601 rschube+   5.3   2.3   0:50.36 Isolated Web Co
  16415 rschube+   1.3   2.3   0:36.49 librewolf      

playing

    PID USER      %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND 
   8685 rschube+  41.7   1.8   1:58.14 freetube
   8652 rschube+  10.9   0.9   0:37.24 freetube

idle

    PID USER      %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND 
   8685 rschube+   4.3   1.6   1:51.41 freetube 
   8652 rschube+   3.3   0.8   0:34.97 freetube