A Chrome extension for YouTube, for when your hands are busy
Hands full? presses the Skip button on YouTube ads the moment it appears. No more putting the slice down and dragging a greasy finger across your trackpad for one tiny button.
YouTube lets you skip after five seconds. It just assumes you have a free finger at that exact moment. Often you don’t.
Put it down, wipe your fingers on your jeans, find the button, pick the slice back up. Or just keep eating.
Following a recipe video with dough on both hands. The laptop is clean. Let’s keep it that way.
You are on the couch, it is on the desk, and an ad just started. Nobody is getting up for that.
The baby is finally asleep on you. You are not moving for anything, least of all a mop commercial.
There is no setup, no account and nothing to configure. It is on the moment you add it.
One click from the Chrome Web Store. It only ever runs on youtube.com and sits quietly until an ad shows up.
When YouTube shows its Skip button, Hands full? presses it straight away with a real click, the same click your finger would make.
The little icon in your toolbar keeps count of the ads it skipped for you, and has one switch if you ever want Skip back.
Hands full? is not an ad blocker. It does exactly what you would do if your hands were free, and nothing else. If YouTube doesn’t offer Skip, the ad plays.
We tested the shortcuts too. Some of them quietly tell advertisers you watched the whole ad when you didn’t. We threw those out. A real press of Skip gets reported as exactly that: a skip.
YouTube ignores clicks made by scripts, so a fake click does nothing. Hands full? makes a real one, through the same Chrome feature that developer tools use. Chrome is careful about that feature, so it shows a short notice whenever it is used.
You will see it slide in at the top when an ad gets skipped, and it closes by itself about five seconds later. It is Chrome being honest with you, and we would rather keep it honest than hide it.
No servers, no account, no analytics. Hands full? looks at one thing on YouTube, whether the Skip button is showing, and keeps two numbers on your own machine: how many ads it skipped and how many seconds that saved you.
Free. No account. Working before your next ad.