You might enjoy invidious. It's a frontend for youtube that cuts 99% of the bloat and show videos directly in your html5 player. It even supports subscriptions without a google account!

FWIW you can also subscribe to YouTube channels / Playlists (IIRC) via RSS feeds. I think they removed the official buttons, but the links still work and are easy to forge by hand.

Is it still running ok. Didn’t the main instance shutdown or something? Sorry, I forget the specifics.

The instance of the original dev has shut down because he seized developement, but the project ist still doing fine. There's multiple public instances, but those are often unable to handle all user requests and get rate limited by google every now and then. I'm currently using invidious.tube, it has a good "real" uptime in my opinion (the site is up the whole time but might have issues like described above). I'm considering just self hosting should things get worse.

I see. Thanks for your reply.

I haven't had success with using Invidious. I'd love to ditch the YT frontend and tracking though.

I have extensions that remove suggested videos on the sidebar, homepage, and during the video; as well as ads, comments, and product recommendations. I use YT in a Firefox container without an account that is separate from my other Google container.

You can run your own instance; that’s what I do. Public instances tend to be overloaded or their external IP becomes temporarily banned by YouTube (since its traffic is obviously more than what a typical home would use).

How do you specify what sites to be put in a container? What I want to be able to do is anytime I click on my bookmark link, it'll open it up in a new container. I haven't figured out a way to do this without some manual process.

The official "Multi-Account Containers" extension does that. Honestly I don't understand why it's not built-in, because as you mention without it it's hard not to "leak" outside of the containers.

With it you can associate domains with containers and tell Firefox to always open them in a container. It will also automatically un-containerize if you follow a link to a third party domain. Basically how I expect containers to work.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

Holy crap thank you so much for this! This was the primary thing I complained about for containers and why I never bothered to use them. I completely agree this should've been integrated with it and it makes no sense to me why. Containers as it is are pretty tedious.

The Enhancer for YouTube extension cuts down on the annoying things when not logged in. I was able to move to YouTube to temporary containers using the EfYT extension to set my preferences.