Brave, Video Downloadhelper, and the Chrome Web Store

I wish to use Brave with Video Downloadhelper, as I had done for quite some time before the Chrome Web Store added an age restriction to the extension. I want nothing to do with Google, so the recent requirement of signing up for a Chrome Web Store account comes off as rather heavy-handed, to say the least. Moreover, I can’t even ask Video Downloadhelper’s staff about possible workarounds, because their forum is on Google Groups!

In my many months of checking by various search engines for a solution, I’ve not found even a hint of this being an issue with anyone else. This is baffling, and I’m starting to feel like the last privacy supporter on Earth! Why is there not groundswell support for so obvious a use case?

P.S.: What happened to the “temporarily allow” option in the shields settings? The removal makes it inordinately difficult to maintain privacy, for it’s all too easy to forget to manually revert a site’s permissions.

Should I have posted this in a different area?

@1F409,
Thank you for reaching out to us and apologies for the late reply here.

Unfortunately if you’re downloading from the Chrome webstore you are, as you stated, restricted by requiring a login. However, you should be able to find the .crx file and install the extension manually.

For example, I was able to safely download and install the extension as a .crx file using the following website (Rapidgator download):

After downloading, I simply click-and-dragged the file into the brave://extensions page and was able to add the extension into the browser directly.

Please let me know if this does not work for you.

Thank you. I thought that there might be a way to install it manually, but didn’t spot any instructions on the extension’s website. Unfortunately, when dragging the downloaded file to the extensions page, I get the message, “Apps, extensions, and user scripts cannot be added from this website [OK]”. Even disabling Safe Browsing doesn’t help.

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I have since tried several times more, guided by some how-to pages that were made within the past year. Apart from those, I have found hardly anything quoting the “Apps, extensions, and…” message. So far, nothing has worked, not even the developer mode installation that requires manual updating. My security settings are fairly stringent, but nothing beyond the commonplace options found in Brave 1.44.112’s settings menu.

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