this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Browser addon/extension to use web archive for reddit links (addons.mozilla.org)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Before the blackout I saw some of the posts about helping archive.org to store all reddit, and AFAIK they completed it.
Also, checking stuff to deploy lemmy and help the project I stumbled upon the problem I've seen a lot of us have: we search for solutions on reddit.
Most of the times is just to read, not to actually create a post, so I created this addon for Firefox to automatically ask web archive for the page instead of reddit.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reddit-to-wayback-machine/

A few caveats and stuff I'll improve later,
It forces to old reddit since new reddit doesn't load everything at once so the snapshot is incomplete.
It forces all the times you search reddit, so if you want to actually visit reddit to interact you need to disable the addon.
It doesn't handle the case when there's no snapshot :P
It's only for Firefox because it uses webRequests, I don't know yet how to implement this using MV3 to upload it to the chrome store.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Oh neat! Thanks for doing this

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This looks great! Any plans to open source it? Not that it's all that hard to pop open the .xpi to be fair.

Also minor suggestion: it looks like the archive.org API always returns non-HTTPS URLs (e.g. https://archive.org/wayback/available?url=https://old.reddit.com/r/programming gives http://web.archive.org/web/20230612074029/https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/). Might make sense to switch the protocol for the minor security boost.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Yeah, I already have the repo, I'll just update some stuff (tho I guess it irrelevant since the history will still be there haha).

The url comes directly from web archive, I guess since we know https works then I can force it. Not sure if it should be better for the user to set this up in Firefox.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That's so awesome! Can it work on Firefox mobile browser?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

In theory it was set up for that too, but I don't see the option to install it there, I'll check it since I also want it there.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Edit: Firefox Android will not allow you to subscribe to any addon out of the box, below is a workaround.
Firefox allow you to subscribe to a collection of addons on Firefox for Android.
To create a collection log in at addons.mozilla.org in a browser and go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/ and create a collection of all the addons you want your phone to have.
This Collection will have a URL of https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections///
The numberstring is your User ID and used to subscribe later on.

To access the custom collections you need to first activate the secret debug menu:
Open Firefox on your phone, go into Settings -> "About Firefox". Click on the firefox logo until the Debug menu is activated.

With that you can subscribe to the custom Add-on collection using Collection owner (User ID) and Collection Name.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Seems this is only possible in Firefox nightly and still only with the recommended addons.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/12/15/new-extensions-available-now-on-firefox-for-android-nightly/