About Nyan Progress Bar

What it is

Nyan Progress Bar is a small, focused browser extension for YouTube and YouTube Music. It does exactly one thing: it draws an animated cat (or any GIF you choose) on top of the video scrubber. There are no settings menus to learn, no accounts to create, and no subscriptions. You install it, you pick a cat, and that's the entire product.

Twelve cat themes ship out of the box, ranging from the original rainbow Nyan Cat to a pixel parrot, a glitchy chromatic cat, a dancing Garfield, and several minimal silhouettes. You can also upload any GIF from your computer to use as your own custom scrubber — the file stays on your device and is never sent anywhere.

Why we built it

The project started as a personal frustration: spending hours every day on YouTube, looking at the same flat progress bar, and thinking it could be a tiny moment of joy instead. The classic Nyan Cat seemed like the obvious first cat to try, and once it was running on a real YouTube video it was clear that there was a small but meaningful pleasure to it.

Everything since has been driven by a simple idea: a browser extension can be calm, focused, and delightful. Most extensions ask for too many permissions, show too many UI surfaces, or try to monetize attention. Nyan Progress Bar deliberately does none of that — it's a tiny utility that adds one small smile to your day, and then it gets out of the way.

How it works

Under the hood, the extension is a Manifest V3 Chrome extension that runs only on youtube.com and music.youtube.com. When a YouTube page loads, the extension finds the progress bar element and overlays your chosen GIF on top of it. The GIF moves with the scrubber position because it's anchored to the same element YouTube uses for the playhead.

Your cat selection, height, and top-offset values are saved locally using the Chrome Storage API on your own device. Nothing is uploaded to a server. The extension does not make any network requests; it does not read your watch history, your search queries, or anything else about your YouTube usage. If you uninstall the extension, every trace of it disappears with it.

Who builds it

Nyan Progress Bar is built and maintained by an independent developer who works on it in their spare time. The project is open source — pull requests for new cat designs, translations, and bug fixes are very welcome, and the contact form on this site goes directly to the maintainer.

The site is translated into ten languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Polish, Ukrainian, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Filipino) so users around the world can read about the extension in their own language.

Our values

A few principles guide how we build and run the project:

• Privacy first. The extension does not collect or transmit data — period.
• Ad-free inside the extension. There are no upsells, no premium cats, no subscriptions.
• Open and transparent. The codebase, donations, and roadmap are all out in the open.
• One small thing done well. We will never expand into ad-blocking, sponsorship-skipping, or general YouTube tweaks. The progress bar is the product.

Get in touch

Have a question, an idea, or a bug to report? The fastest way to reach us is via the contact form, or you can email us directly at pryvalov.bogddan@gmail.com.