There are more ways to get rid of YouTube Shorts than people realise, and they fail in different ways. This is an honest comparison of the four that actually work on desktop, including where each one falls short.
The short version: the thing that separates a method that works from one that feels broken is whether it handles both halves of the problem — the Shorts pages themselves, and the places YouTube offers them to you.
Why one fix is never enough
Almost nobody types youtube.com/shorts into the address bar. You are on YouTube for something else, a Short appears in the feed or the sidebar, and you click it.
That has two consequences most methods get wrong.
If you only hide Shorts, they are still reachable. A direct link from a friend, a search result, an autoplay chain — any of these still drops you into the vertical player, where the format takes over.
If you only block the address, you still see them constantly. A row of Shorts thumbnails sits on your homepage every visit. The block then arrives after the temptation, which is backwards. You have already looked.
Keep that in mind through what follows.
1. YouTube’s own settings
What it does: On desktop you can dismiss the Shorts shelf from your homepage, and you can tell YouTube you are “not interested” in individual Shorts to nudge the recommendations.
What it misses: The shelf comes back. There is no setting anywhere in YouTube that turns Shorts off permanently — the dismissal is temporary and the feature is not designed to be disabled. Nothing stops a Shorts URL from opening.
Worth it if: You only want a quieter homepage today and do not want to install anything.
2. uBlock Origin cosmetic filters
What it does: uBlock Origin lets you write cosmetic filters that hide page elements. A handful of rules will strip the Shorts shelf, the sidebar entry and the Shorts cards in search results. Free, open source, and no account.
What it misses: Cosmetic filters hide; they do not redirect. youtube.com/shorts/... still opens and plays. And because the rules target YouTube’s internal element names, they break when YouTube changes its markup — which it does regularly, and rolls out gradually, so a rule can be dead for you and alive for someone else. When it breaks, nothing tells you. The extension is still installed and simply stops working.
Worth it if: You already run uBlock Origin, you are comfortable maintaining filter rules, and hiding is enough for you.
3. A single-purpose Shorts extension
What it does: There is a whole category of these — extensions that exist only to remove Shorts. The better ones both hide the shelf and intercept Shorts URLs, and they do it with no configuration at all.
What it misses: They solve exactly one site. Shorts is not the only infinite feed in your day, so you end up installing a separate extension for Instagram Reels, another for TikTok, another for the X timeline — each with its own settings page, its own permissions, and its own maintenance. None of them can be scheduled, so it is on or off forever rather than “blocked during work hours.” And the same markup fragility applies: a single-purpose extension that stops matching is just as silent as a filter list.
Worth it if: Shorts genuinely is your only problem and you want the smallest possible thing that solves it.
4. Section blocking in a full website blocker
What it does: Blocks youtube.com/shorts and hides the shelf, the Shorts cards and the sidebar button — with the rest of YouTube untouched. Because it is part of a general blocker, the same switch list also covers Instagram Reels, Reddit r/popular and Facebook Reels, and it can follow a schedule: Shorts blocked from 9 to 5, back in the evening.
This is what SiteBlocker does, and it is free.
It also handles the case the others tend to miss. Clicking a Short from inside the YouTube feed does not load a new page — YouTube swaps the content in and rewrites the address without a page load, so a blocker that only checks on page load never sees it. SiteBlocker watches for that specifically, on sites where you have a section switched on and nowhere else.
Measured, not asserted. We checked this against the live site rather than trusting our own selectors: on a YouTube search results page, 31 Shorts links were visible before the hiding rules were applied and 0 after, with all 10 rules parsing. That test was run on 26 August 2026. It is worth stating the date, because this is exactly the kind of claim that quietly stops being true when a site changes its markup — and the first version of our own selectors was wrong, which is how we found out.
What it misses: It is a browser extension, so it covers desktop browsing, not the YouTube mobile app. Its YouTube selectors were measured against the live site (31 visible Shorts links on a search page before, 0 after), but its selectors for the other platforms are derived from URL structure and have not been verified the same way. And it shares the underlying fragility of every method here: any approach that hides page elements depends on markup that the site controls.
Worth it if: Shorts is one of several feeds costing you time, or you want the block to follow a schedule rather than being permanent.
Side by side
| Hides the shelf | Blocks Shorts URLs | Catches in-feed clicks | Schedulable | Covers other sites | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| YouTube settings | Temporarily | No | No | No | No |
| uBlock filters | Yes | No | No | No | With more rules |
| Single-purpose extension | Yes | Usually | Varies | No | No |
| Section blocking | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
What to actually do
If you want this solved in two minutes and never thought about again, use a blocker that does both halves. If you are already a uBlock user and only want the shelf gone, write the filters — it is free and it works.
What is not worth doing is relying on YouTube’s own controls. They are not built to turn the feature off, and treating a temporary dismissal as a fix is how people conclude that “blocking Shorts doesn’t work.”
If you want the step-by-step, it is on how to block YouTube Shorts without blocking YouTube. If Shorts is not your only problem, blocking short-form video covers all six feeds SiteBlocker can turn off.
