Scrubber

Comments pinned to the moment they're about.

People have been typing timestamps into YouTube comments for over a decade — then burying them under a thousand other comments. Scrubber reads them off the page and draws them where they belong: on the progress bar.

Get Scrubber Free and open source. Two clicks in Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc and Opera; Safari and Firefox install by hand, below.

Manual installation for Safari and others

Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, Opera

Download the zip from the latest release and unzip it.
Open chrome://extensions — or edge://extensions, brave://extensions.
Turn on Developer mode, top right.
Click Load unpacked and pick the unzipped folder.
Open any YouTube video. Marks appear once the comments load.

Hand-loaded extensions don't auto-update, and Chrome re-asks about developer mode on every launch. The store version is the quiet one.

Safari

Safari has no "load unpacked" — every extension ships inside a native app, so this one has to be built. You need macOS with Xcode installed, not just the command line tools.

Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/alex-mind/scrubber
Run ./build.sh safari-app — it converts the extension to an Xcode project, builds it, and installs Scrubber.app to /Applications.
Open Safari → Settings → Extensions and tick Scrubber.
Set youtube.com to Allow on Every Website, or at least Always Allow on This Website — without this the extension never runs.

If it doesn't appear in the list, quit Safari completely and reopen it — Safari reads its extension list once per launch. Without a paid Apple developer account the build is unsigned, and Safari then needs Develop → Allow unsigned extensions ticked again after every restart.

Move your cursor across the bar below.

0:00 —

A real density profile: taller, brighter marks mean more people stopped to say something about that moment. Hover to scrub.

What it does

Shows a video's shape

Where people stopped to comment is where something happened. You can read that off the bar before you watch a second.

Surfaces the good one

As you watch, the best-liked comment about the moment you're in appears, then gets out of the way. One per burst, spaced out.

A contents page nobody wrote

On tutorials, roughly one comment in eight carries a timestamp, and they cluster hard on the parts people got stuck at.

Add your own mark

Reply, like, or write a comment stamped with the moment you're at — it posts to YouTube normally, so it auto-links for everyone.

About your data

A YouTube extension that reads comments deserves suspicion. So, precisely:

There is no server. Not one that's optional or off by default — there is no backend, no account, and nothing to sign into.
It asks YouTube the way the page does. Comments come from youtube.com's own endpoint, on youtube.com, using the session already in your browser. No third party ever sees anything.
It posts only when you press send. You can reply, like, or write a comment stamped with the moment you're at — each from an explicit click, never on a timer and never while signed out. What you type goes to YouTube and nowhere else.
It stores your settings and nothing else. No history, no identifiers, no analytics, no telemetry.
It runs only on youtube.com. The one permission it asks for is storage, for those settings.
You can check all of this. The source is public and it's about 4,000 lines with no build step and no dependencies.

Browser	Status
Chrome, Brave, Arc, Opera	Supported
Edge	Supported
Safari	Works, but shipping it needs a $99/yr Apple developer account
Firefox	Not yet