41–50 of 246 posts
Disappointed in you Jeremy. Its fair for many here to complain about some of the online advertising practices of publishers. However the viable alternative it to pivot to some form of subscription model. Its a hard transition and many orgs are making risky changes to do better. Extensions like these are a step backwards. If you value the work you should support it. See bio for usual disclaimers
It would be nice if Google could make some of the Chrome permissions a bit more fine-grained. This one needs to "read and change your data on all websites", but with a better extensions architecture could be something much less scary like "read and change your data on the current website whenever you click the extension's icon".
That granularity exists -- it's called activeTab: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/activeTab (Though it might not be possible to modify the referer with activeTab alone :/)
Edit: Sorry bud. I gave it a shot, and `activeTab` doesn't allow you to modify the "Referer" header.
Disappointed in you Jeremy. Its fair for many here to complain about some of the online advertising practices of publishers. However the viable alternative it to pivot to some form of subscription model. Its a hard transition and many orgs are making risky changes to do better. Extensions like these are a step backwards. If you value the work you should support it. See bio for usual disclaimers
If news orgs value their journalists and the future of the profession, they should experiment with more daring models, rather than ones that simply maximally enrich the org under the same old model
EDIT: imho a model that falls apart legally under a browser extension that fits in a 40-line gist is nothing on which to base the livelihoods of a bunch of people
Source code: https://gist.github.com/jashkenas/9a4d9e648eb11aab394e
Did someone make a Firefox version yet?
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/private-tab/
This is gonna mess up some major web analytics stats about referrers :)
As someone who works with SEO, this was my first reaction. It's going to make a lot of my analytics wonky and the numbers won't be very accurate. I guess you have to assume such a small percentage of people will actually be using this, so the numbers won't be too bad??
Disappointed in you Jeremy. Its fair for many here to complain about some of the online advertising practices of publishers. However the viable alternative it to pivot to some form of subscription model. Its a hard transition and many orgs are making risky changes to do better. Extensions like these are a step backwards. If you value the work you should support it. See bio for usual disclaimers
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The design intent is almost certainly using Google's "first click free" policy, which primarily applies to newspapers like the NYT or WSJ. Google back in the day struck a deal with the print media: they would remain in Google's index if and only if clicking from a Google search to their articles circumvented their paywall on the first click. If they put only partial content or a full paywall, they'd be delisted. It w…
I am a working professional but I have always resisted buying a subscription because I don't want one single publication to become my de facto news source. I would love if I could pay $20 to $30 per month to some aggregator that lets me read articles from Al Jazeera, NY Times, WSJ, BBC, and a selection of other diverse sources.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One issue with the subscriptions, at least with the NYT, is that their pricing is a little crazy. The phone version is $15, the tablet version is $20, and both together are $30. It seems... excessive. WSJ at least (used to?) offer a single subscription that gives you access on all devices.
Not to defend the NYT craziness, but that plan somewhat exists in the weekend print edition and should save you money, too. Subscribe, check the box in your account to have them donate your paper copy to a school or library, and enjoy access on all of your devices.
Disappointed in you Jeremy. Its fair for many here to complain about some of the online advertising practices of publishers. However the viable alternative it to pivot to some form of subscription model. Its a hard transition and many orgs are making risky changes to do better. Extensions like these are a step backwards. If you value the work you should support it. See bio for usual disclaimers
Subscription models are great, and paywalls are great.
What's not so great is creating an internet where if you use our Trusted Corporate Partner™ you're allowed to view a public webpage, and if you come from anywhere less privileged on the internet, you're not. That's not sustainable. Lest we fall into a vortex where you're only allowed to browse the public web by logging in through Facebook. I wouldn't want to be online in that world.
This isn't a complicated extension, and it doesn't do anything fancy to subvert any paywalls — and it's not going to. It simply reloads the page as if you had arrived via Google. I think that's a fair thing to do.
This is gonna mess up some major web analytics stats about referrers :)