Bypass Paywalls Clean is an open source browser extension for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and other Chromium-based web browsers that loads paywalled articles once installed.
More and more sites implement paywalls as part of subscription services. Some sites allow guests to view a small number of articles before the paywall is erected, others may ask guests to subscribe right away. The main reason for doing so is to get users to sign-up and pay for the access privilege.
While sites and organizations may do as they please, more and more users are irritated by paywalled sites. Search for a topic on a search engine or stumble upon a link on a social site, and you may be directed to an article that you can’t read unless you subscribe first. This user experience is frustrating.
Bypass Paywalls Clean is a browser extension that bypasses paywalls on more than one hundred sites. One of the main ideas behind the browser extension is to give everyone access to news. The developer has this to say about the extension’s purpose:
Not everyone is able to afford multiple subscriptions on many different news sites, especially when they just want to read a single article (from Twitter) without being enrolled in a monthly/yearly membership.
The extension works right after installation. You should be able to read articles on the supported sites without configuring anything beforehand.
The extension’s settings list all supported sites. There you may enable or disable individual ones, and check the preferences. Note that the extension has a daily user counter enabled by default, which you may disable here as well.
Bypass Paywalls Clean supports custom news sites, which you may add to the extension; this requires technical understanding of how bypasses work, on the other hand. Just select custom sites to get started and fill out the relevant values to add a bypass for a custom site.
Options include blocking JavaScript, using regular expressions for blocking, changing the user agent or referrer, and other parameters.
New sites that get added by the extension developer are enabled automatically once the extension picks them up; this can be disabled in the preferences. There, you also find an option to check for updated rules on startup, which is disabled by default.
Closing Words
Bypass Paywalls Clean worked well during tests. We did not experience any issues using it, but some interruptions may occur when sites make changes and rules are not updated right away. As long as rules do get updated, bypasses should continue to work though.
Now You: how do you handle sites with paywalls?
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