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It's horrible that the web has come to this, a need for a browser hack to restore the UI that some website hacked off.

Product designers are going to experiment...Vote with your feet. Don't use horrible products. The only thing worse would be EU mandated progress bars

I would love to vote with my feet. How do I watch YouTube or Instagram content with VLC, or some other user friendly video player?

Look into LibRedirect and the projects it uses and also things like youtube-dl/yt-dlp.

https://libredirect.github.io/

https://libredirect.codeberg.page/

> A web extension that redirects YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok and other websites to alternative privacy-friendly frontends.

https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends

https://github.com/digitalblossom/alternative-frontends

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/frontends/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36146076

mpv understands URLs to these websites and uses yt-dlp to download them.

On KDE, I assigned an action to open some URLs with mpv, which means I can play then from the clipboard manager or the copy menu that is displayed when copying if it's enabled.

At least users can [for now] do this on the web! Try fixing poor UI on a locked-down native mobile app.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com