What powers the badge and the feed
FolderTube's extension background script (a Manifest V3 service worker) uses the browser's chrome.alarms scheduler to wake up roughly every 30 minutes and fetch each subscribed channel's public YouTube RSS feed — the standard youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=... endpoint that YouTube exposes for every channel. This does not touch the YouTube Data API, so it does not consume any API quota, and it does not require any additional OAuth scope beyond what FolderTube already uses to render the sidebar.
Each cycle fetches channels in batches, spacing requests out with a short delay between them, and saves progress as it goes so a single cycle can be interrupted (service workers can be killed by the browser at any time) without losing what was already fetched. The result is a rolling local cache of each channel's most recent uploads, refreshed on a fixed schedule rather than in real time.
Not real-time
Because refreshes run on a roughly 30-minute cycle, a brand-new upload will not appear in the badge or feed the instant it goes live. Expect a delay of up to about half an hour, not push-notification speed.
Two features, one data source
The same cached RSS data feeds two separate UI pieces:
- The unread badge — a small purple count next to a folder's name in the sidebar, showing how many videos published since you last checked that folder are still unseen.
- The new-upload feed panel — an expandable list inside a folder showing the actual new videos: thumbnail, title, channel, and how long ago each was published.
The badge is a free feature. The feed panel — the list of actual videos — is Premium. Free-plan users still see the unread count, but opening a folder shows a locked, blurred preview with an upgrade prompt instead of the real list.
What counts as unread
A video counts toward a folder's unread total if it was published after the later of two timestamps: the point where FolderTube's background polling first started tracking that folder, and the last time you expanded that folder in the sidebar. Expanding a folder moves its threshold forward immediately — free-plan users clear the badge just by opening the folder to see its channels, the same as Premium users opening the feed panel. There is also an explicit "mark as seen" action inside the feed panel itself, useful if new videos arrive while the folder is still expanded.
Videos older than 30 days are not counted, so the badge cannot balloon indefinitely from a channel you have not checked on in months. A folder's badge is the sum of its own unread count plus the unread counts of any subfolders nested underneath it.
Shorts are excluded from the feed by default
By default, Shorts do not count toward the unread badge and do not appear in the new-upload feed. This is a setting you can turn off if you want Shorts included — the toggle applies to both the badge count and the feed panel together, since they share the same underlying data.
Because YouTube's RSS feed does not flag which entries are Shorts, FolderTube checks this separately in the background after the main RSS fetch, so a freshly uploaded Short may briefly show up before its Shorts status is confirmed and it drops out of the count.
Add real folders to YouTube
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Add to ChromeNew vs. watched: two different concepts
It is worth being precise about the difference between two things that sound similar:
| New / unread (this feature) | Mark as Watched | |
|---|---|---|
| What it tracks | Whether a video has appeared in the folder feed since you last checked | Whether you have personally marked a video as watched |
| Effect on the video | No visual change to the video itself; only affects the badge count and "NEW" label in the feed | Grays out the thumbnail and adds a checkmark |
| Where it lives | Folder badge and folder feed panel | Anywhere the thumbnail is shown, including the feed panel |
| Free plan limit | Badge is unlimited on free; the feed panel itself is Premium | 30 marks per month on free, unlimited on Premium |
The two do interact in one place: a video that shows up as "new" in the feed panel but that you have already marked as watched displays with its watched checkmark instead of the NEW label, so you are not nagged about something you already dealt with. Neither feature hides or removes videos — Mark as Watched only grays out a thumbnail, it never removes a video from a list or feed.
How this differs from the Subscriptions page folder filter
It is easy to conflate this with FolderTube's other folder-related feature on YouTube's Subscriptions page — the folder filter, which is a separate, free feature. The filter narrows the native Subscriptions page down to a chosen folder's channels; it does not add unread badges or a dedicated feed panel, and it does not track what is "new" versus previously seen. The unread badge and feed panel described in this article live in the FolderTube sidebar itself, not on the Subscriptions page.
If you use both
A practical combo: use the sidebar badge to spot which folder has something new, then either open that folder's feed panel (Premium) or switch to the Subscriptions page and apply that folder's filter (free) to watch from YouTube's native player.