Bypass Paywalls Vanishes From Firefox Addon Store

Key Takeaways

look at you you're a thief you're the kind of person who'd steal an article and until very recently doing so on Firefox was incredibly simple I'm sure we've all been using a search engine and we find an article that catches our eye let's say investors are exiting U.S stock funds during 2023 Rally or whatever Boomers read on the Wall Street Journal and then you scroll down a little bit and you can't read it there is a paywall but it's showing up in a search engine so the paywall is not being shown to the web crawlers so they get the best of both worlds the page gets indexed and you have to pay the money but as with anything on the internet the people are not happy with whether it's advertising or downloading YouTube videos or anything else someone is going to find a workaround and that workaround on Firefox was a plug-in called bypass payables Firefox clean and on the chromium side it's basically the same thing but it is the Chrome version this version isn't relevant to today's video because this one is always required the user to manually set it up whereas over on the Firefox version it was available in the Firefox add-in store that is until it wasn't anymore if you follow the link from another site for an extensional theme that item is no longer available this could be because the developer removed it in this case they didn't Mozilla removed it which seems like the most likely case and this came pretty much out of nowhere leaving users completely in the dark with no idea why it was removed because the git lab is still very much active and still being worked on with the developer saying on Twitter bypass paywalls clean has been removed by Mozilla from the add-in store without notification for updates you can switch to the non-amo version though export your custom sites first for Android you have to switch to the Kiwi browser Amo literally standing for add-ons.mozilla.org so switch to the version that didn't come from the add-on store and it'll continue you working and continue being updated and the developer does have instructions on how to do exactly this it's not that much hassle but it is a lot more work than just going to the store and magically installing it but even though this is really annoying for the user the developer doesn't seem to be that worried about it being removed it seems like they kind of expected it to happen at some point in the future someone made this issue on the gitlab removed from the Firefox add-in store hi was this removed from the Firefox ad-in store well that is a really stupid question because if you go to the page you can clearly see it was removed yes yes it was a much better question being why was it removed and who caused the removal did you remove it yourself did some journalists get really angry about it did it break the Mozilla terms and conditions what actually happened and the dev did give a little bit more information about what's going on indeed removed today without any notification too much use as I guess they're still ultimately guessing but they're assuming that this extension was getting a little bit too popular and judging by the web archive it did seem like that was the case before it got removed it had a hundred and fifty thousand users which compared to something like you block origin for example is absolutely nothing and a drop in the bucket but back when ad blockers were first being created they had users like this and then over time they got more popular more people found out about them and now Adblock is basically unanimous and a little bit further than the thread someone asked a question which in retrospect is probably really dumb could you resubmit it to the Firefox store and if Mozilla removed themselves this clown Emoji absolutely makes sense and the dev has this to say the add-on won't be on mozilla's add-on store again though dmca takedown this is a few days after what was being set up here so it's very possible that he received further information about out why it was taken down and this result does make a lot of sense especially if you consider it in the context of Adblock content blockers whatever you want to call them so in the early days companies basically ignored them they might have implemented sermon you know protections on the website itself but they didn't really go after the ad blockers and the ad blockers continued to grow and grow and grow and grow and they're literally at the point where if you use the internet and you're even remotely tech savvy you at least know about an ad blocker I can absolutely see why any of these journalism Outlets that have a paywall would not want something like this to become as unanimous now with all this going on you might be wondering something entirely sensible how does a plug-in circumvent a paywall if you have a paywall there shouldn't the pennywool only go away if you pay the money now the answer is yes that should happen the problem is paywalls are made by developers and developers will take shortcuts if you don't pay them enough money to do things properly and it turns out that a lot of websites do not pay their developers enough money to do things properly so let's have a look at the sites supported by bypass payables Firefox clean and maybe you will recognize you know a couple of them Reuters the New York Times The Washington Post Time Magazine Bloomberg The Wall Street Journal Vogue Forbes hmm what else do we have in here uh some random BBC ones Cora medium hmm USA Today I politics let's go to the UK the telegraph the independent we can just keep going and going and going basically anything you would ever want to read probably has a broken paywall and they may be broken in different ways some sites are so bad that the paywall is just an overlay and all you have to do is delete the HTML element that is the overlay some of them use like a pop-up login screen and you can't close the login screen unless you just inspect element delete it some of them will do a redirect some of them require a login token of some sort that requires spoofing these are the sites that are actually somewhat getting there but don't take all of the necessary steps going back to the really bad ones a lot of modern browsers have a built-in reader mode it gets rid of all of the fancy stuff and just puts the text on the screen in a form that's easy to read and uh a lot of paywalls Break In reader mode and let's not forget all of the websites that break in a web archival service a lot of the time all you need to do is look at the website on the Wayback machine and there's no payable there and all of these problems can be fixed if you pay your developers enough money to fix the problem and some of these problems are being fixed or slightly rearranged and that's a big part of the reason why this plugin is just always being updated besides the fact that it's adding in support for new and different websites but I don't have any data on this but I would imagine the reason why they're not focusing on it as much as Adblock where there are some Services where if you're ad blocking it literally will not function is that there's just not as big of an incentive to fix the problem this plugin only had 150 000 users on the Firefox plugin store and by having to go and manually set it up a lot of users just are not gonna do so there will be the absolute hardcore users but most people just accept there's a paywall all now there are other services that do exist like 12 foot for example show me a 10 foot paywall I'll show you a 12 foot ladder where you can just plug in a website and then it will do its magic and make the site usually work a lot of big sites know because they talk to the developers of this and get them to remove it but if you like what bypass payables clean was doing but you're the kind of person likes to have less installed there might be a better option for you what you can do is go and grab the filters and then load these in as a custom script with things like add Garden ublock origin and things like that now whoa many users simply don't want to pay for articles this does have a more practical benefit this tool which is what it is is incredibly useful for researchers whether it's independent research and you're just trying to expand your knowledge base or you're employed as a researcher with fairly limited funds and you can't really justify spending those funds on all of these different article Outlets I totally respect using a plugin like this to get around those paywalls but I also just don't really care and if you want to go and use it go ahead and do so now there is a really neat little bit of history about why this is called the clean version as opposed to just bypass payables Firefox and bypass paywalls Chrome so a couple of years back there was a bit of a drama that led to a fork the original chromium version of the extension was by a sep separate developer called I am a damn Dev and there was this issue called Google analytics where the developer where the developer was using Google analytics to track the amount of users using the extension they weren't doing anything else with it they were only doing that but a lot of people simply do not like Google analytics just at the face of it if you're gonna have analytics do it with anything else this led to a bit of a giant drama because the Firefox version wasn't using it was just the chromium version it seemed even weirder and not long after Magnolia made his version and probably due to having clean in its name it became a more enticing version and eventually became the main version and then as it became the main version it got more developer support and got better and better and better and left the old version in the dust and now most people don't even realize that original version ever existed so let me know are you a bypass paywalls enjoyer did you ever know this extension existed now that you know it exists are you gonna use it I would love to know and if you liked the video go and like the video and if you really like the video and you want to become one of these amazing people over here go check out my patreon scrub simply verapay Linked In the description down below uh that's gonna be it for me and don't steal it's bad [Applause] foreign [Music]