☕ Watchtime Tracker v3.0.0 is here!

☕ Watchtime Tracker v3.0.0 is here!

Jul 21, 2026

imageThis is the biggest update since the extension went fully Chrome native. It's a proper major jump, all the way from 2.4.2 to 3.0.0. Months of work went into making your stats more accurate, tracking new things, and freshening up how everything looks. Here's what's new.

📱 YouTube Shorts are now tracked

Shorts used to be completely invisible to the extension. Now they get their own Shorts tab, counted separately from your normal YouTube time, so your "real video" numbers stay clean while your Shorts habit gets its own honest tally. And it ticks live too. Open the popup while a Short is playing and you'll watch the seconds climb in real time.

🎮 A proper Twitch overview

There's now a full Twitch watch time overview covering today, yesterday, this week, this month, and all time. Your streamer leaderboard moved into its own clean Channels tab, and streams tick live in the popup while still respecting your muted stream settings.

If you've been around a while, you might spot a small note explaining that day by day Twitch history only began on July 17, 2026. Your earlier Twitch time is completely safe and still counts toward your totals and leaderboard. It just can't be sliced into past weeks or months.

🎯 Smarter, more accurate tracking

Tracking got a lot smarter this round, and you're now in control of how it counts.

If you've got the same video, Short, or stream open in more than one tab, the extension is clever enough to count it just once. Close the tab it's counting on and another one seamlessly picks up right where it left off, so nothing gets lost and nothing gets counted twice.

When you're watching two different things at the same time, you get to decide what that means for your stats. By default your daily totals count the actual time that passed, since you can't really watch two streams at once. But if you'd rather have every stream and video added up on its own, just flip on the new "Count simultaneous playback separately" setting. It only changes how things are displayed, so switching it recalculates even your old days without ever touching your underlying data. Either way, each channel always keeps full credit on its own leaderboard.

On top of all that, a lot of work went into making sure the numbers you see are the right ones. There's now a whole set of safeguards working quietly in the background to catch bad or accidental tracking before it ever reaches your stats, so what you're looking at actually reflects what you watched.

💛 A supporters wall

Everyone who buys me a coffee now shows up right inside the extension, on the Support tab:

  • A spotlight for the latest supporter and their message

  • A ranked wall with a 👑 crown for the top supporter

  • Monthly members get the VIP treatment with a gold ⭐ badge, floated up to the top

Donate privately and you stay anonymous. It's just my little way of saying thank you somewhere everyone can see it. 🙏

🔧 Lots of little quality of life touches

You can now see which account is active right in the Settings tab, so you always know where your watch time is going. Returning users can log back in more easily from the guest screen, and switching accounts no longer confuses your synced data.

Syncing across devices is much better too. A rebuilt system means a second browser won't show stale numbers or lose your same day data, and manual sync now refreshes everything instantly and actually tells you if something went wrong. On top of that, the popup got plenty of polish: nicer carousel arrows and dots, a fixed grey bar underneath, tidier settings sections, and a bunch of layout cleanups.

🛠️ Behind the scenes

Not everything is something you can see. A lot of foundation work went in this round: a modernized data model that never touches or loses your old data (so rolling back stays safe), early groundwork toward optional self hosted syncing later on, a move to modern build tooling, dozens of security and dependency updates, and tougher automated testing that catches when YouTube or Twitch quietly change their sites.


Thank you for using Watchtime Tracker, and an extra big thank you to everyone who keeps the coffees coming. ☕ This is still a free, ad free, one person project, and your support genuinely keeps me motived. Enjoy v3! 💛


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