How To Bypass Paywalls On Articles

by admin · Published November 6, 2021 · Updated April 26, 2023

If you’ve tried to read an article online and found that they lock it behind a paywall and you still want to see what it’s about without paying then lucky for you there are solutions to bypass the paywalls on these websites. It’s pretty simple to setup and we’ll break down different methods of how you can accomplish this. You can use Chrome, Brave, Firefox, or Edge to achieve this.

Chrome Extensions For Removing Paywalled Articles

Chrome Magnolia extension

First extension allows you to read articles from (supported) sites that implement a paywall.
You can also add domains as custom site and try to bypass the paywall.
Weekly updates are released for fixes and new sites. Can be found Here

Installation:

The following instructions are needed to install third-party extensions in Chromium-based desktop browsers.
In extension developer mode you can always install BPC by Load unpacked (latest master, but no automatic updates) or by crx-file (latest release & automatic updates, but possibly you have to add the extension to the allowlist).

Load unpacked: Chrome, Microsoft Edge or Brave (all desktop)

or add extension to allowlist and install automatically updating crx-file (see next section)

Download this repository as a ZIP-file from GitLab.
Unzip the file and you should have a folder named bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean-master.
Move the folder to a permanent location on your computer (do not delete the folder after installation).
Go to the extensions page (chrome://extensions or edge://extensions).
Enable Developer Mode.
Click Load unpacked and select the extension folder. (or simply drag the folder into browser window to install)

By default BPC has limited permissions, but you can opt-in to enable custom sites (and also clear cookies/block general paywall-scripts for non-listed sites).
For custom sites you can also copy manifest.json from custom folder to the main extension folder (in Chrome optional permissions can get lost on reload unless you do a crx-installation first; no allowlist is needed).
In Chrome/Opera/Brave to disable the developer mode extensions popup use the extensions toolbar menu (by default enabled in Chrome 87+ or (if available) enable (experimental) chrome flag: chrome://flags/#extensions-toolbar-menu)
You can view the list of supported sites Here

Alternative Method:

You can also get an extension that changes the way your browser identifies itself to websites, this way you can declare that you are a google bot, which allows you to view the site in full as if you were a google bot that indexes the site for search engine results. You can find the extension Here

Simply select google bot.

Chrome 2nd Extension method

The second method for blocking paywalls, extension can be found Here

Installation is the same as above

Firefox Extension

The Firefox extension can be found Here (its the firefox version of Extension 2 for chrome from above)

Installation: To install an extension manually, download the XPI file, then open Firefox and select ‘Add-ons’ from the menu. Drag and drop the downloaded file onto the list of currently available extensions. Click ‘Install‘, then restart your browser when prompted to activate the extension.