Note: I donated and am a premium account user.

I was honestly sceptical going into using this downloader. I mean, we all know how sketchy it is to find anything that doesn't yell at you with stupid ad placements, is free of broken functions, janky menus, errors, and just works. This does the job, though, better than anything else I know.

Operation is pretty straightforward: it slaps a drop-down next to the "subscribe" button on YouTube. Click it, and you'll get a list of options. Choose your format and quality, wait a while, and then it'll present you with a download dialog box not unlike downloading anything else off the internet. Alternatively, you can also access the drop-down from the button on your toolbar if you'd prefer, though there isn't a way to actually get rid of the inline button.

Really I can't think of anything to properly fault this add-on for, it makes downloading videos so painless I honestly don't want to think about how I managed this before. I have donated and have access to the higher quality presets, but even a free user gets up to 720p quality, which for the average guy who wants to download a video for offline viewing or memes, is probably good enough. The extension itself appears to be built intelligently too: if you accidentally cancel out of the dialog box, upon reloading the page and retrying the page, the app seems to serve you a cached copy of that transcode, so you don't have to wait through another lengthy conversion process. Nice!

Occasionally the transcode might fail, or the extension gets stuck on a "already in queue, please wait" for an unusual amount of time. But that's also easily fixed with a quick restart of the browser (or the computer in one instance), and based on my experience downloading a /lot/ of videos with this tool, real bugs like this seem rare. The closest thing I can maaaybe fault the developer for is that they're clearly not a graphic designer, and I do kind of wish the button menu matched my dark theme. But a quick look around makes a lack of visual flair par for the course with these kinds of add-ons, so again I can't honestly dock stars for that. Besides, 99% of the time your interaction with this app is that drop-down menu, and the button's placement and styling on the YouTube page is pretty well done all things considered; half the time I have someone looking on my screen they don't even notice it's there. Plus, if you really want it to look pretty, it's easy enough to install something like Stylus and have a go matching the fonts yourself.

Overall, I've used a lot of YouTube downloaders before, and this is definitely the best I've encountered. It's just really streamlined and hard to find fault in. If you want an extension to just nick a video off of YouTube, no if-so-buts no strings attached, this more than scratches that itch.