Chrome Window Expander For YouTube

Chance is that your visit the popular video hosting site Youtube with different window sizes of the browser. Some users may always visit it maximized but the majority is probably visiting it with different window sizes. The problem here? Well, Youtube is not automatically expanding the video. It still displays that meager video frame even if you run a 1920×1200 or higher resolution on your computer monitor.

Window Expander For YouTube is a Chrome extension that takes care of this problem, or shall we say inconvenience. The extension can be configured to always expand the video to fit the window size of the Chrome browser, no matter if the size is 800×600 or 2560×1600.

The Chrome extension places an icon in the address bar (when on Youtube) that can be used to expand or shrink the video frame directly which means that it is possible to perform the operation manually as well.

A right-click on the button and the selection of Options opens a configuration menu with settings to set the resizing to automatic. Videos look better in high quality, which is why there is another setting to define a preferred video quality for Youtube videos which the extension will automatically switch to and load.

This feature has a few downsides as well. Users need to click the address bar icon again to be taken back to the original page with the comments and related videos. This can be bothersome especially for users who view dozens of Youtube videos in a session.

The videos did not start automatically as well, which was kinda annoying as I had to press the play button on the screen every time before the video would start playing.

Still, the idea is great and there are certainly users who will appreciate the extension. Those who do or want to take a closer look find it at the official Google Chrome Extensions gallery.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Saturday December 18, 2010 -
Tags:google chrome, google chrome extensions, window expander for youtube, youtube, youtube videos