▲ 3 points

Ask HN: How do you bypass paywalls on Safari?

I recently made the switch from Chromium to Safari, and along with other things I'm missing there's one thing I'm really missing: the bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean extension. It was a game-changer for me, allowing me to access a wide range of content without any hassle, sometimes recommending archive snapshots for things it fails to bring.

I'm curious to know how you all handle paywalls. Do you have any go-to methods or tools that you swear by? I'm open to trying out new solutions. I know that you can run user scripts on Safari, so having something like bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean should not be difficult, right?

6 comments

I am using this extension. I disabled the toolbar icon and run it from the right click context menu.

https://octalwise.com/acidity

archive.is and a shortcut to it added as a share sheet action. I found a walkthrough online for setting that up, works most of the time.

Tell me a reason why you gave up Chrome

In addition to wat jkmcf mentioned, Safari is known to be much better in battery consumption than Chrome.

Spyware? Disabling uBlock Origin?

The Brave browser on iOS has the bypass-paywalls-chrome filter list installed as an option under shields. It's not perfect, but it gets past quite a few. On the project site (now hosted on a Russian github clone called gitflic, after being kicked off github & gitlab for DMCA claims) they mention using it on iOS with a Shortcut app and Unpaywall, or Adblock/Adlock. I don't use iOS so, hopefully some other issues can chime in to expand on that. But, I recently installed Brave browser on my father's iPhone so he could sync his profile and use the paywall bypass option.

https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clea...

They also mention in the BPC repo, using a browser called Orion, but it apparently doesn't support 100% of the extension's functionality.

https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chro...

Another helpful list, while not bypassing paywalls explicitly, serves somewhat of a similar purpose, is Browse Websites Without Logging In from DandelionSprout.

https://github.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/blob/master/Browse...

I have quite a few other bookmarked sites that claim to bypass paywalls in a variety of different ways if you'd like to look them over, but I can't speak on their quality or functionality.

There was also a great thread on Reddit titled How to (Really) Bypass Paywalls in Safari on iOS in 2023, which got deleted, but luckily got saved on IA. The scripting seems to be acting a bit strange when I try to load the site through there, but that might be on my end, not sure.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240716231923/https://www.reddi...

12ft dot io was shut down recently, so that's no longer usable, the links for the BPC extension has changed, but it's linked above. And finally, the gold (if not silver) standard is to always pass the links through archive.today and it will get you past the paywall probably 8 times out of 10.