Invidious is an alternate interface (also called front-end) to YouTube, without the ads or the tracking. There are a few invidious installations (also called instances) one can choose. They all serve the same content but one instance might be faster than the others depending on its geographical proximity to the viewer.
The Invidious Safari Extension, once enabled, redirects all YouTube links to the corresponding ones on the invidious instance of choice. The Invidious Safari extension is automatically installed by macOS the first time the user runs the Invidious app. Once that is done, the app itself does not need to stay open or be executed at all, although there is no harm in doing that. Users can choose to activate the Invidious Safari extension by clinking on the corresponding checkbox in the Safari Preferences, under the Extensions tab (see image below). The Invidious app checks whether the Invidious Safari extension is active or not and display a small status line in its main window.
The Invidious Safari extension itself should be completely transparent to the user and has has no UI elements whatsoever. The main use of the Invidious app, on the other hand, is to select which invidious instance to use (see image below).
As shown in the image above, users can select their preferred instance from the application drop-down menu. One should be aware that invidious is a volunteer project and instances can and do have varying levels of uptime. Please check the invidious Wiki for more information and uptime statistics.
For more information and updates, please check out this page or send email to [email protected].
Have fun in a world with somewhat fewer ads and tracking beacons!
You need a recent version of XCode (tested to work on XCode 11). Open invidious.xcodeproj and build the project. Yoy might (most likely will) have to change the signing certificates.
- Sep 19, 2020: open sourced
- May 10, 2020: initial release for macOS