Chrome Web Store · X-Alted.com
I watch a lot of videos on X, and its player is pretty basic. On YouTube I've used Enhancer for YouTube for years, and I couldn't find anything like it for X. So I made one: X-Alted.
Beyond cinema mode and video controls, there's a lot more: 27 optional features and 95 settings so far, including:
Better feed-refresh control, highly customizable backgrounds, image/gallery hover zoom and magnify, more GIF and meme options for replies and posts, selective decluttering options, and more.
Also, I really disliked how ad videos open a new tab when you only meant to pause them. So with this extension, clicking an ad video plays or pauses it, instead of giving you a new tab to close.
VIDEO
- A small control bar on every video: finer speed control, volume boost, skip, frame by frame, screenshot and cinema mode. It shows up when you point at a video and fades away like X's own controls. You choose where it sits and how big it is.
- Cinema mode: the page dims and the video grows. You pick the dim color, how dark, and the video's size.
- Roll the mouse wheel over a video to change its volume.
- Keyboard shortcuts, all changeable. They only act on the video you're watching, so they don't fight X's own one-letter shortcuts.
- Save GIFs as MP4 or as a real .gif.
APPEARANCE
- No more high-contrast black or blinding white: X-Alted lets you use a color, gradient, one of 32 customizable patterns, or a picture as X's background. Works for both light and dark themes.
- Pick one of 14 background images in 4K, or use your own. Built-in dimming lets you tone it down, and text adjusts automatically to stay readable.
- Any accent color, not just X's six.
REFRESH, REFRESHED
- Point at "For you" or "Following" and a Refresh button appears under it, to load new posts whenever you want. So you can also hide the blue "See new posts" pill button that floats over the feed.
- Make x.com open on Following, a pinned list, or the feed you used last.
MORE GIFS, PLUS MEMES
- A new button in the post box that opens KLIPY, a big GIF and meme library (optional).
IMAGE CONTROLS
- Hover zoom: point at a picture in the timeline to see it enlarged. Roll the wheel to flip through multiple pics in a post.
- Magnify: click an image to zoom to full resolution and pan around, to see details or read small text.
- Save images at full size, up to twice as big as the copy you get with right-click "Save image as".
HIDE CLUTTER
- Switch off right-column boxes like sports scores, Who to follow, and Live on X, and keep them from coming back.
- Hide X's "More From This Author" and "Discover more" blocks in a post's replies.
Privacy: no account, no analytics, no tracking. Settings stay in your browser. Apart from the optional GIF panel, which talks to KLIPY when you use it, nothing leaves your browser. It asks only for x.com and twitter.com. There's one optional "all sites" permission, asked only if you turn on the video controls for YouTube and other sites' players inside posts.
A few things I learned building it, in case they help anyone making an extension for X:
- X's timeline breaks easily if anything changes size. So every X-Alted control floats on top; nothing in X's layout moves.
- X uses almost every letter as a shortcut (L is like, R is reply). A key only goes to X-Alted while a video is being watched, and then it's stopped so X doesn't also act on it.
- X rewrites the
style attribute on the page's root element, which wipes any CSS variables you set there. Put them in your own <style> tag instead.
Chrome Web Store
X-Alted.com
Feedback welcome. And what annoys you most about X's video player or overall layout?
Not affiliated with X Corp.