YouTube Quick Look

About

Preview YouTube videos anywhere — without ever leaving the page you're on.

YouTube Quick Look brings macOS-style Quick Look to your browser. Hover any YouTube link or thumbnail, tap the spacebar, and a floating player pops up right where you are. Tap space again, or hit Escape, and it's gone. No new tabs to manage, no context switching, no losing your place.

Why you'll love it

You're reading an article and the author drops three YouTube links. Normally you'd open them in new tabs, watch each, then dig your way back to the article. With Quick Look, you stay exactly where you are — hover, peek, dismiss, keep reading. Same story on Reddit threads, Twitter feeds, Discord, Slack, technical blog posts, recipe sites, anywhere people share videos.

It feels obvious the first time you try it. After a day, every other browser starts to feel a little broken.

Key features

• Instant preview — Hover, press space, watch. The fastest way to check a YouTube link without committing to it.
• Works everywhere — Detects YouTube links, embeds, shorts, youtu.be shortlinks, and even thumbnail grids on YouTube itself.
• Stays out of your way — Floating preview is draggable by the header and resizable from the corner. Click outside, hit Escape, or press your trigger key again to close.
• Configurable trigger key — Don't like spacebar? Click the toolbar icon, pick any key. Your choice syncs across devices via Chrome Sync.
• One-click on/off — Toggle the extension from the toolbar popup without uninstalling.
• Smart focus handling — Never hijacks the spacebar in search boxes, text fields, or YouTube's own player controls. It only activates when you're actually hovering over a video link.
• Clean shutdown — Closing the preview fully removes the player from the page. No background audio, no memory leaks, no surprise tab sounds five minutes later.
• Privacy-friendly — Asks for the minimum permissions Chrome will allow. No tracking, no analytics, no account, no data leaves your machine. Open source on GitHub.

How it works

Install the extension.
Visit any page (Youtube) with YouTube links — search results, a blog post, social media, a chat app.
Move your mouse over a YouTube link or thumbnail.
Press the spacebar.
Watch. Press Escape to close.
That's it. There's no onboarding flow, no signup, no settings you have to configure to make it useful. It works the moment you install it.

A note on YouTube itself

Because YouTube blocks its own embed player from being embedded on youtube.com, the preview on YouTube opens as a small dedicated popup window (cleanly closable with Escape) instead of an in-page overlay. On every other site, you get the full floating-overlay experience.

Built with care

YouTube Quick Look is a single-purpose tool that does one thing and does it well. It's built on Manifest V3, uses Shadow DOM to avoid touching any site's styles, and ships under 15 KB. No build tools, no trackers, no bloat.

If you like the extension, a rating helps a lot. If something doesn't work the way you expect, file an issue on GitHub — feedback is welcome.

Open source

Code, issues, and releases: github.com/marshmellooow/youtube-quick-look