Quick fix

This version is a quick fix of an oversight of mine, the blacklist was still not working correctly on the trending feed page, this should now be corrected.

Small fixes and improvements

A recent YouTube update caused the blacklist and its thumbnail buttons to malfunction, this has been corrected. An additional improvement has been made to the loading of the pop-out as well as the correct resizing in the Opera browser.

Couple of fixes

A recent change on the YouTube video data caused the video thumbnail to not work properly. This situation has been corrected.
YouTube is also starting to use a different method for delivering video streams for non-live stream videos. This caused the HFR feature to not work any longer since they were not including the non-HFR streams in their manifest. A recent revisit to this situation allowed me to discover that this is no longer the case, so far, and the HFR feature is now fully working once again with this update.

Small fix

This version corrects a false detection of the beta Material layout which was caused by any link containing sub-strings that matched the filter. This should no longer occur.

Quick fix

This update fixes a small issue introduced by the previous version which was affecting the subscription grid layout incorrectly, this should no longer be a problem.

Small fix

YouTube finally launched the big thumbnails in search results permanently, meaning that the previous filter which helped distinguish both sizes no longer worked. This update fixes this problem.

Few fixes and improvements

This version fixes an issue where playlist videos in fullscreen would switch to the next video ignoring the playlist autoplay choice.
A recent update to the YouTube comments section was causing them to auto expand automatically when following linked comments, this problem should no longer occur.
The Material Layout detection has been improved and the message should again display the correct instructions for disabling it if the user wants to.

Small fixes

This release log has been overdue by mistake, but it only contains minor fixes to the grid layout in search results and allowing linked comments to work properly.

Small update

This version includes an enhancement for the comments, when a user has the comments disabled or hidden and clicks a comment link, the comments will load by default to allow the user to be directed to the linked comment. This does not work for replies to comments because YouTube does not have that behavior working.

YouTube Plus might end with the upcoming YouTube Material Layout

This version comes with a small fix to a page element null check and removal of the webextension migration notice.

I am also taking the opportunity to make an announcement which I wouldn't want to do it via YT+ directly because it felt too invasive. This was already posted in the issue tracker #448, but I am also posting it here for more visibility.

For the better part of almost one year YouTube started working on its new Material based Layout: http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/3/11576016/youtube-material-design-test

Right from the start trying to work on the new layout proved to be difficult, with constant changes every week breaking any kind of progress made. For this reason the work on the YT+ Material compatible version stopped until the new layout became more stable. Until about four months ago I resumed the work and started studying the new layout and immediately noticed big challenges: despite the similarities, the Firefox and Chrome Material layout versions are not the same. YouTube is now using Polymer for the new layout, but due to limitations on Firefox (or just Google trying to push their standards?) this meant that there were two different structures to work with, meaning that YT+ would require a lot more code to avoid having two different versions, each one specific to each browser.

Polymer works as a template & recycle structure and, although Firefox presented very few challenges, Chrome, on the other hand, was a completely different situation. Due to the way the Material layout is structured, the majority of the elements necessary to work are not ready when the pages are presented, instead they are constructed once the information has finished loading. This causes a lot of problems since there are quite a few elements YT+ needs to work, which are not available when it needs to, namely the navigation bar and the video thumbnails.

While I have been able to work through these challenges, the level of difficulty and complexity have become borderline unreasonable. Although going a different route and wait for the page to finish "constructing" would solve the biggest headaches, another problem arises. Since the Polymer is recycling elements, all removed blacklist videos would cause incorrect videos to not show (during page refresh or changes) or remove incorrect videos. This meant that at least one big feature would no longer work.

The problems don't end here, since this layout hasn't been launched officially, any progress made to this date could become broken when the launch becomes official. Font scaling is also another huge problem which now appears to be different, depending on the users pixel density, and the worst part of all of these problems is that the Material layout is terribly heavy. Memory consumption isn't too bad, but the navigation in vanilla (without YT+) is sluggish and every time a new page is loaded the entire browser locks up when YouTube "constructs" the new page with the received information. Any experience so far in this layout, with and without YT+, has been terrible and this hasn't changed since the layout was first tested.

At this exact moment the YT+ Material version source code is opened on the other half of the screen, stopped at the welcome message and I have started to dread resuming work. The joy of working on YT+ has been dwindling since work on the Material version began and it reached the bottom today.

This isn't fun for me anymore, my free time has been very scarce and might become nonexistent in less than 15 days. With all of the above problems culminating I have decided that YT+ will very likely die once the Material Layout goes live. I wish I had more time and resources to dedicate to this project full time, but simply put the donations aren't enough (about $8/month) and I have to focus on more important things in my life.

Do not take me wrong, I appreciate every donation made, even the few who donated $0.30 which were totally absorbed by the transaction commissions, I didn't even want to ask for donations, some even criticized me because I didn't publicize the extension, but these extras, from those that could share, always helped. And no, I am not forgetting the very valuable users input, which helped fix and improve a lot of problems in YT+.

It has been 2 years and 29 days, a total of 176 versions (177 now) have been released so far and a total of over 60,000 users have been boarding this experience. When it started it was nothing but a script for myself to enjoy YouTube better, it had no settings menu, no structure, just a bunch of code garbled up. This project helped me learn a ton of new things and provided me with an incredible perspective of the developers' side. Light, useful and fast were always my priorities for this extension.

I will continue maintaining the current vanilla version of YT+ and will keep an eye out for the Material layout to see if, perhaps, something changes in me again, however don't get your hopes up, I am tired and my life is not easy. On a different note, I might also go forward with the dedicated Blacklist and AdBlocker for YouTube Material, these were the two features I worked the most while trying to make YT+ compatible with the new layout and they appear to be relatively simple to maintain as individual extensions and extremely useful, at least to me.

Again, everyone is free to fork the project, I only ask that the license is respected. It is small and easy to understand, it shouldn't take more than 1 minute to read.

I'd like to thank again the author of YouTube Center, Jeppe Rune Mortensen, whose work was the inspiration for the creation of YouTube Plus.

It has been fun.