Without a notification in advance, Mozilla has removed the popular Bypass Paywalls Clean extension for Firefox from the addons.mozilla.org (AMO) catalog. As per extension's developer, the removal happened due to a DMCA claim. This makes impossible to restore the add-on in AMO in the future.
The removed extension was widely used to bypass the Paywall restrictions on many websites. A Paywall is a special technique that reveals certain posts on a website to only bots, such as search indexers by Google and Bing, and social media bots. For the rest of visitors it only appears after they pay for a subscription.
The extension made the website think that it is a bot visiting the website, so the original post appears as a full-pledged text. Prior to the removal, the add-on had 145 000 active users.
Interested users still can install an XPI file from author's GitLab here. Sadly, Mozilla has already made it harder to install a Firefox extension from anywhere outside their add-on catalog. You can learn more on this topic in this post: Firefox will get the Load Temporary add-ons feature.
Also, Nightly and Developer editions of Firefox allow you to sideload any add-ons.
Finally, uBlock Origin users can attach a custom filter to their extension. uBlock Origin can handle the filter created for the Bypass Paywalls Clean add-on, which is hosted on GitLab as well. Check out this link:
https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filters
There, you will find the bpc-paywall-filter.txt file and a quick tutorial on how to connect it to popular add-ons.
If you are a Chrome/Edge user, the author has a special version for Chromium based web browsers. You will find it here.
Support us
Winaero greatly relies on your support. You can help the site keep bringing you interesting and useful content and software by using these options:
If you like this article, please share it using the buttons below. It won't take a lot from you, but it will help us grow. Thanks for your support!
Advertisеment
