OperaGX just brought back the YouTube dislike counter

A lot of people miss the dislike counter on YouTube. It was a quick way of finding out whether a video was any good or just clickbait with little information. Ever since, we’ve seen various ways of obtaining the counter back. Now, OperaGX has just added an option that brings back the dislike counter on YouTube.

The official OperaGX account posted about the new option X, saying, “YouTube won’t, so we did.”

In a follow-up reply to the main post, the account asked people to update to the latest version of OperaGX, and then enable it via the Playground options.

To check for this feature, I’ve updated to the latest version of OperaGX (v133.0.5932.81), “Level 8,” and then followed the steps.

1. Click the Settings button (the gear icon).
   
2. Navigate to the “Playgrounds” submenu available within Settings.
   
3. The first option that shows up is “Dislike Counter.” Just hit “Add” or click the Plus button.

Following this, I opened a video on YouTube, and sure enough, the dislike counter does show a number now. If it doesn’t show up on an existing YouTube tab, you’ll need to refresh the page.

However, the accuracy of such tools is heavily debated. These tools can’t obtain official information from YouTube, since real-time official counts are unavailable now. So, they rely on historical archives, estimations, and ratios to derive an approximation of the dislike count that would have been there if the feature still existed. As a result, I wouldn’t recommend taking these numbers at face value. It’s just a vague estimation at best, enough for a cursory glance.

To check the “accuracy” of the dislike counter on OperaGX, I compared it with an existing popular option. It’s a Chromium extension called “Return YouTube dislike.” For the exact same video (at roughly the same time), the dislike counter was largely matched between the two.

Following this test, I also realized that Opera is merely relying on data from Return YouTube dislike. There’s no proprietary software here; they’ve just made the installation a bit easier since it’s integrated with “Playgrounds.”

Featured image: AI

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