The tools are quick now, and they stay out of the way
The magnifier used to take a photograph of the page every time you moved it, which is why it blinked at you and why scrolling with it on felt broken. It now shows the live page instead, so it keeps up. Sketch has been rebuilt from scratch on the same footing, the three tools finally share one set of menus, and every tool panel opens the moment you ask for it rather than most of a second later.
Patch Improvements
Long dropdown lists now look long. The category picker on Video ideas holds 23 entries and presented itself as a two-entry one: the menu was being cut off by the panel around it, and the scrollbar that would have told you there was more was invisible. Both fixed.
Your target viewer is there when you open Advanced on Video ideas. The picker was only ever filled in by other parts of TubeSpanner, so whether it appeared at all depended on where you had already been in the panel. It now loads its own.
The magnifier shows the live page, not a picture of it. Every move used to mean a fresh screen capture, so the lens flickered, scrolling lagged behind, and anything that moved on the page was frozen inside the lens. It now magnifies the page as it actually is, and it keeps up while you scroll.
The magnifier stops hiding from itself. It had been cutting TubeSpanner's own panels out of the view and hiding the lens whenever it passed over them, which is the one place you most often want to look. Both rules were left over from the screenshot version and are gone.
The lens shape buttons work. Circle, square and rectangle all produced a circle.
Tool panels open straight away. There was a deliberate pause of about three quarters of a second before a panel's contents appeared. Nothing needed it.
Sketch has been rebuilt. Same tools, but on the same panel as everything else, so it matches the rest of TubeSpanner and behaves the way the other tools do.
Sketch settings are a tab, not a hidden gear. The deeper settings used to be behind a small cog that was easy to miss. They are a Settings tab now, and the pages turn between them.
Sketch settings are per tool, as they look. Width and opacity appeared to belong to whichever tool you had selected and did not. Each drawing tool now keeps its own.
Buttons look like buttons. Auto fade and Reset were styled as links. The help text that used to sit permanently under the controls is on hover instead, so the panel is shorter.
Controls that cannot do anything say why. Copy, download and delete used to sit there inert with no explanation when there was nothing to act on. They now tell you what they need.
A setting to stop the pointer following links. Pointing at something on a page used to risk navigating away from it mid-demonstration. Turn this on and clicks still show the ping but stop opening links. Buttons and menus still work.
Your tool settings are remembered between sessions. Sizes, colours, shapes and the rest carry over instead of resetting every time.
Hovering a control tells you what it does. One line at the bottom of the magnifier, pointer and sketch panels, rather than a wall of text around every setting.
Esc closes a tool panel. It worked for one tool and not the others.
The panel tabs turn like pages. Moving between sections of TubeSpanner now animates instead of snapping, and the first turn is as smooth as the rest.
The tools get out of your way
Turning on the Magnifier, Sketch or Pointer used to hand you a settings panel over the very thing you wanted to look at, every single time. Now the click just turns the tool on. Settings live behind a small cog on whichever tool is running, and everything else has been tidied up around that: the panels match the rest of TubeSpanner, the magnifier's zoom works across its whole range, and nothing comes back on by itself after a refresh.
Patch Improvements
Turning on a tool no longer opens its settings. Clicking Sketch, Magnifier or Pointer fired two things at once: the tool, and a 300px panel on top of your work. That is what made the tools feel like they were in the way, and it is also where the second menu came from. The click now only turns the tool on.
A cog appears on whichever tool is running, and only that one. Click it for that tool's settings, click it again to put them away. For Sketch it hides and shows the palette instead, so you can see what you have drawn without the menu over it, and the canvas stays live while it is hidden.
The tool menus look like the rest of TubeSpanner. Frosted glass, the squared corner, a white background instead of a lilac one, and a border you can see when the panel is floating over someone else's page.
The magnifier's zoom does something across its whole range. The bottom of the slider was 1x, which is no magnification at all, and it was labelled in pixels. It runs 1.5x to 5x now and says so.
The magnifier no longer blanks the screen for the best part of a second each time you use it. That was the moment it took its picture of the page, and you were paying it again on every scroll.
Tools stay off after a page refresh. A magnifier left on came back on with every new page until you remembered to turn it off. Sizes, colours and shapes are still remembered, because those are worth keeping and "it was switched on" is not.
The sketch palette stays open. It had been saving a hidden Keep Collapsed setting nobody chose, so it folded itself away on your first stroke and stayed that way.
The pointer's click ripple is visible again, and it matches the pointer's shape rather than always being a circle. It also stops drawing over our own toolbar, so it no longer rings the buttons you are reaching for.
Fewer controls doing the same job. Each tool header carried an on/off switch, a minimise arrow and a close, on top of the Launcher that already turns tools on and off. The Launcher owns on and off, the cog owns settings, the X closes.
A/B testing works again, and it is one button now
YouTube renamed the classes on its experiment dialog and our A/B tools quietly stopped appearing inside it. They are back, matched in a way that survives the next rename, and while they were open we made the thing simpler: one button instead of three, a green Fill my variants for when you have no basis yet for choosing between five titles, and your whole thumbnail library instead of the most recent twenty.
Patch Improvements
A/B testing works again inside YouTube Studio. YouTube renamed the generated classes on its experiment dialog, so every selector we used to reach it stopped matching and the integration silently did nothing: no title generation, and no way to insert a thumbnail from your library. Selectors now match the stable middle of the name rather than the prefix that changed.
One button instead of three. The assistant used to change shape depending on which of YouTube's own tabs you were on: a Title generator on one, a Thumbnail generator on another, neither on a third. The tab you are on is context, not a different tool, so there is now one Suggest variants button and the tab decides what it opens.
Fill my variants does the whole job in one press. Choosing between five titles assumes you already know what you are looking for, which is not true the first time. The green button fills the empty slots for you. Slot 1 is deliberately untouched: it holds your live title, which is the control the test is measured against.
The panel no longer covers the slots you are filling. It sits beside YouTube's dialog rather than centred on top of it, so you can see the slot you just filled instead of guessing.
The thumbnail picker shows your whole library. It used to stop at the 20 most recent, so anyone with a real library was only ever shown the end of it.
The Viewers column stops emptying itself once you save a second audience. With two or more saved targets, choosing between them replaced the description, Change and Remove with just the dropdown, leaving the column blank next to a full one. The picker is additive now. Anyone with a single target never saw this, which is why it lasted.
An idea's brief follows it into the script. Taking an idea from Ideas with improve the title first sent its title to Discovery and left the brief behind, so Generate Script there only had the title to work from and the idea never really arrived.
The questions in your comments are video ideas, and answers your AI can use
Your viewers have been telling you what to make and what they want to know about you. We were already reading it and throwing most of it away. This release keeps it: the questions worth a video now show up as ideas you can save, and the questions about you become facts that make your AI replies sound like you.
Patch Improvements
You can see when there is more to scroll. The panel now shows a slim scrollbar wherever a section runs past the bottom, rather than leaving you to guess whether a list has ended.
Video ideas that came from your own viewers. Ideation has a new tab holding ideas found in the comments on your videos. They behave exactly like generated ideas, so saving one turns it into a project and Refine works on it as normal. The list is short on purpose: most comments are reactions rather than questions, and only the ones a video would actually answer get through.
An idea you have already covered says so. If a question is answered by a video you have made, it appears with the video named and no Save button, rather than tempting you into making it twice.
Saving an idea now clears it. Previously anything suggested to you came back on every visit whatever you did with it. Save it or dismiss it and it goes.
Your User Facts no longer look broken. Rows showing a label and nothing after it were not damaged data. They were questions pulled from your comments that nobody had answered yet, sitting in the same list as your real facts and looking like a fault. They now have their own section that says what they are.
Answer a question in one line. Type the answer where the question is and it becomes one of your facts, which is what shapes the AI replies we write for you.
Dismiss means we stop asking. Dismissing a question keeps a record that you refused it, so the same topic cannot come back a few days later under a slightly different name. It stops appearing for you either way.
The most asked questions come first. Each question shows how many separate comments raised it, and only the top few show until you ask for the rest. If you had dozens waiting, they no longer bury the facts you have already saved.
Questions arrive in your viewers' own words. Where we have the original wording you see "Where do you film?" rather than "Location", so there is nothing to interpret before you can answer it.
Patch Bug Fixes
The Toolbox says what happened instead of showing an empty page. If your tools cannot be loaded, usually a brief connection problem, it now tells you and offers to try again. It also no longer claims your toolbox is empty when nothing came back at all.
"New Thumbnail" opens the editor again. Choosing a size from that menu on a video's edit page led to a missing page, so there was no way through to a blank canvas at the size you picked. It also now carries your sign in, rather than dropping you on a login screen in a new tab.
"Viewers and Avatars" in the account menu opens the right page again. It still pointed at an address the site stopped using, so it led nowhere. Every other link from the extension into your dashboard was checked at the same time and they all resolve.
Your home screen shows your latest video again instead of an empty box. When your milestones could not be loaded, the panel still announced that you had reached one and left a blank space where the badge should have been. The video it was meant to show instead could never appear, because the check for "no milestone yet" only recognised one of the several ways there can be nothing to show.
Dismissing and answering now confirm they worked. Both check the question really has left your list before telling you it has, so an action that quietly failed can no longer report success.
Patch Breaking Changes
None.
Patch Upgrade Notes
Chrome, Firefox and Edge update automatically through your browser's extension store. No user action is required. Ideas from your comments need your YouTube channel connected, and are refreshed every couple of days rather than on demand, so the tab may be empty until the next check runs.
Staying signed in, and an Upload Assistant that says what it is doing
A fortnight's work in two parts: the extension should stop signing you out for no reason, and the Upload Assistant now tells you where your work is going instead of leaving you to guess.
Patch Bug Fixes
You should stop being signed out for no reason. A brief network problem was enough to delete your saved credentials. The extension would then sit there with no data and no explanation rather than recovering. It now waits out a blip, renews your session by itself where it can, and stops retrying a session that is genuinely finished instead of hammering it in the background.
When you genuinely have been signed out, the extension says so. The panel used to go blank and the button opened nothing, which looked exactly like a crash and was reported as one. It now tells you what happened, confirms your saved work is unaffected, and takes you to sign in again. The sketch, pointer and magnifier tools keep working while you are signed out.
"Write this for me" in the social composer works from what you have typed. It only ever worked if you had also attached a video. With words alone it failed every time, and the message asked you to try again shortly, which could never help.
Smart Links are reachable again. They were being blocked before the request left your browser, with a permission error that had nothing to do with your account.
Your video title carries through from Discovery, and stays there. Opening a video page overwrote a title you had just written with the one already on YouTube, silently and every time. A title you have chosen is now left alone until you change it, and moving to a different video picks that video's title up as normal.
The Upload Assistant no longer takes the whole panel down on a video edit page, and it stops wiping your tags every time you open one.
Patch Improvements
You can see whether your draft matches what is on YouTube. The title and description show whether they are the same as the last version we checked, and where they differ you can open a side by side comparison of exactly what changed, right down to a single added space.
Saving is one button again. It used to ask you to choose between three destinations every single time. It now does the obvious thing for where you are, says underneath where it is going, and keeps the rarer choices under "Save as".
Templates and descriptions are no longer the same word. A template is something you keep and reuse. A description belongs to a video. "Your descriptions" previously meant both on the same screen, once as somewhere to insert from and once as somewhere to save to.
Opening the Upload Assistant without a video asks which video you are working on, instead of showing an empty form with no way to load anything into it.
Projects rows can reach the video. One control opens it in YouTube Studio to edit, and the YouTube button opens it to watch. Delete has moved to the end of the row, away from the buttons you use often.
Patch Breaking Changes
None.
Patch Upgrade Notes
Chrome, Firefox and Edge update automatically through your browser's extension store. No user action is required.
The extension no longer restyles the pages it runs on
This release fixes a problem where TubeSpanner was changing the appearance of the websites it runs on, and a set of related problems where those websites were changing the appearance of the TubeSpanner panel.
Patch Bug Fixes
Pages are no longer left unreadable. The extension was setting the text colour on every page it ran on, so any site that let its text inherit that colour turned white on white. YouTube's terms and policy pages and StreamYard were where it showed most, but every site the extension loads on was affected. Nothing outside the TubeSpanner panel is styled now.
The section menu keeps its icons when collapsed. On some YouTube pages every icon except the one you were on was pushed outside the collapsed menu, which left it looking empty apart from a single button.
The panel looks the same wherever you open it. Spacing, and the alignment of the account and close buttons in the panel header, were being decided by whichever page the panel was open on, so the same panel did not quite match itself between Studio and the rest of YouTube.
The Viewers icon matches the rest of the menu. It was rendering smaller than every other icon beside it.
Patch Breaking Changes
None.
Patch Upgrade Notes
Chrome, Firefox and Edge update automatically through your browser's extension store. No user action is required.
Fixes for the panel header and the section menu
Two fixes for problems introduced in 7.5.7, both on the parts of the panel you use to get anywhere.
Patch Bug Fixes
The account menu opens as a menu again. In 7.5.7 it could fill the whole panel with an oversized logo instead of opening, which also blocked the way through to your dashboard, your account settings and signing out.
The highlight showing which section you are in no longer cuts across the icon. It stopped short on Windows and Linux, where a scrollbar takes up room that it does not take on a Mac, so the marker ran through the middle of the icon rather than sitting behind it.
Patch Improvements
Maintenance is now something the extension tells you about. When TubeSpanner is down, signing in and anything that needs your account will not work. Until now the extension simply failed, which looked like the extension itself being broken. It now says what is happening, keeps checking, and clears itself as soon as we are back, with no reload. Spanners tells you some terrible jokes while you wait.
Patch Breaking Changes
None.
Patch Upgrade Notes
Chrome, Firefox and Edge update automatically through your browser's extension store. No user action is required.
The social composer, rebuilt to match the web app
The biggest change in this release is the social post composer, which now works the way the one on the web app does. Alongside it, several things that were quietly losing your work or scheduling posts at the wrong time have been fixed.
Patch Improvements
The composer follows the order you work in. Writing sits on the left with who the post is for underneath it, and the calendar and scheduling sit on the right. Images, links and videos attach from the composer itself rather than from a separate block of fields below it, and whatever you have attached is listed underneath where you can remove it.
TubeSpanner can write the post for you. Give it a few words or attach a video, press Write this for me, and it drafts from what you have. Choose a target viewer first and the post is written to speak to that person rather than in general.
Scheduling says what it will do before it does it. Publish now, schedule once, or repeat are three plain choices, and only the settings belonging to your choice are shown. An empty day on the calendar offers to take your post and tells you the date it would go out on.
Saving and attaching are separate in the Upload Assistant. Saving a description used to create and bind a project as a hidden side effect, so the same button did different things depending on whether a project already existed. Attaching is now its own action, and your saved descriptions are called that everywhere, matching the dashboard.
Toolbox sits directly after Home. It holds every tool and was sitting second from the bottom, where it was being read as the least important thing in the list.
Panels, cards and the section menu now use the same frosted surface as the web app, in both light and dark themes.
Patch Bug Fixes
Posts can no longer be scheduled in the past, and simply looking at a day on the calendar no longer schedules anything. Browsing to a date used to quietly set your post to go out at midnight that day, and a post with no schedule described itself as going out on the 1st of January.
Descriptions in the Upload Assistant survive leaving the page. They were only ever held in memory, so a refresh, or opening the video in another tab, lost the work. That is what looked like the field clearing itself.
The switches for choosing which icons appear on the bar now work. They could not be turned on or off at all, and any change that did get through was forgotten on reload.
Signing in no longer signs you back out. A check running the moment you arrived could end the session it had just started.
New installs get a welcome, and can create an account. The welcome was built somewhere only signed-in people could reach, so nobody had ever seen it, and a first run had no way to sign up.
Patch Breaking Changes
None.
Patch Upgrade Notes
Chrome, Firefox and Edge update automatically through your browser's extension store. No user action is required.
Patch Status
Stable
Colours that were missing now show, and follow your theme
A tidy-up release. Several parts of TubeSpanner were asking for a colour by a name that did not exist, so they rendered with no colour at all, and a few places inside YouTube's own pages had a light colour pinned on regardless of your theme.
Patch Bug Fixes
The sign-in form has its colours back. Its text and background were both being set from names that were never defined, so they fell back to whatever happened to be inherited. Same cause in parts of the popup, the colour picker and the competitor list.
Dark mode is respected inside YouTube. Where TubeSpanner adds buttons and panels to YouTube's own pages, a few of them had a fixed light colour, which showed as near black text on a dark page. They now take YouTube's colour, so they follow whichever theme you are using.
Patch Improvements
None in this release.
Patch Breaking Changes
None.
Patch Upgrade Notes
Chrome, Firefox and Edge update automatically through your browser's extension store. No user action is required.
Patch Status
Stable
Kim can see your channel, and act on it
Kim is the same assistant in the extension as she is on the web, and she can now see your channel and do things in it rather than only talk about it.
Patch Improvements
One Kim, in both places. She has her face, she remembers what you have already said in the conversation, and she can act on your channel when you ask: saving an idea, starting a video project, or drafting a script. Anything she creates is listed under her reply, so you always know what has landed in your account.
She can see your channel. Kim answers with your actual numbers and names your actual videos. Ask what to do next and she points at a specific video by name, instead of describing one she could not identify or asking you to go and find the title for her.
Reaching your Kim limit is answered in the conversation. She explains it in her own words with the way to continue attached, rather than a pop-up over the top of the thing you were doing.
Release notes read properly. The About window centred them, which left the eye no edge to return to and stopped the bulleted list looking like a list.
Patch Bug Fixes
Kim no longer tells you to install the extension you are already using. It was the top recommendation for everyone, because nothing had ever told TubeSpanner the extension was there. It does now.
Patch Breaking Changes
None.
Patch Upgrade Notes
Chrome, Firefox and Edge update automatically through your browser's extension store. No user action is required.
Patch Status
Stable