SponsorBlock for YouTube
A crowdsourced Safari extension for Mac that jumps over sponsor reads, intros, outros, and similar segments inside YouTube videos by reading timestamps submitted by other viewers, instead of blocking the separate pre-roll ads YouTube serves before playback.
How it works in Safari on Mac
After you install the App Store wrapper and enable the extension under Safari Settings, SponsorBlock injects into youtube.com pages in Safari. When you play a video, it queries a public segment database and seeks past marked ranges—sponsors, self-promotion, subscription reminders, and other categories you enable. You can submit new start and end times, vote on existing segments, and see colored markers on the progress bar. The project is open source; the database is downloadable, and the extension generates a random user ID for reputation and leaderboard features rather than tying skips to your Google account.
What it does and does not block
The developer explicitly states this tool does not remove standard YouTube advertisements and does not affect the native YouTube app—only the website in Safari (and other browsers if you use those builds). For both pre-roll ads and in-video sponsors, many users pair it with a general ad blocker such as AdGuard. It can also skip non-music sections in music videos and jump to highlight moments when segments exist. Channel skip profiles, added in the 6.1 line, let you choose which categories to skip per channel instead of relying on a simple whitelist.
Mac install options
On Mac, the commercial route is SponsorBlock for Safari on the App Store (one-time purchase, Family Sharing supported). The same extension can be built for free from the GitHub release zip using Xcode and Safari’s unsigned-extension workflow documented in the project wiki. macOS 11.0 or later is required; the universal package also runs on iPhone, iPad, and visionOS with the same extension core.
Version 6.1.6
Release 6.1.6 focuses on chapter handling: YouTube creator chapters should display more reliably on the timeline, and a new setting can hide those creator chapters when they clutter the UI. A Chrome-only privacy tweak for dynamic extension URLs does not change Safari behavior. Recent 6.1.x builds before this release fixed segment skipping when a video was scrolled off-screen, restored the options page after deleting custom configs, and added support for YouTube’s newer embed player—changes that ship together in the current Safari extension package when you update to 6.1.6.
