It doesn't work for me either
35
Bypass paywall doesn’t work
19 days later
cele It doesn't work, and this is a showstopper. Bypass Paywalls Clean is the single most important extension there is. Unless Orion can support it, it might as well not bother with anything else.
Merged 5 posts from Bypass Paywalls extension not working on Orion iOS.
ArcherWithoutTargets Thanks for making your opinion heard.
16 days later
- Edited
Vlad A lot of people do see Bypass Paywalls as their most important extension.
E.g. the mozilla extensions site https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/bypass-paywalls-clean/ shows 144k users and 4.8 stars. It doesn't appear in Mozilla's most popular extensions list for some reason but those stats would appear to put it around 30th in user count and top 10-15 in rating - quite an achievement for an extension which only came out a couple years ago (the extensions with more users presumably racked them up back when Firefox was more popular) and which comes in multiple versions (the linked one doesn't request permissions for all sites - there is another which allows custom sites) and is often sideloaded. There is also a chrome version, which needs to be sideloaded, but is likely to have an additional order of magnitude more users.
See these recent posts in reddit r/ios (hardly a bastion of paywall blocking types, you would expect) and - by comparison r/ios posts like about extension support in general only get 5-15 votes.
- Edited
Vlad, after extensive testing, I can say that there is something wrong with Orion's support of the "Bypass Paywalls Clean" extension on iOS. Please try it for yourself.
Run "Bypass Paywalls Clean" in Chrome or Edge on a laptop. Then, compare the results to the results of running the extension in Orion on an iPhone or iPad. Try these articles:
https://www.ft.com/content/10b6d4f2-d48f-401f-8407-8d5688d1e226
Why do these work on desktop browsers running "Bypass Paywalls Clean," but they don't work on Orion running "Bypass Paywalls Clean?"
ArcherWithoutTargets I think it is because the extension uses a variety of techniques for different sites and eg for ft.com it changes the referer so the user appears to come from google search results. But such techniques are not possible without the webrequest api which Orion iOS cannot implement so I do not know if there is much hope?
- Edited
Correct, the fact that the extension works at all on iOS is a miracle to begin with, but Apple is simply too restrictive with what web extension apis can be run.
Thanks, guys. That definitely explains why the extension doesn't work very well on iOS. It seems that until Apple is forced to allow third-party app stores and non-WebKit browsers (such as Firefox), it'll be impossible for "Bypass Paywalls Clean" to ever work like it does in a desktop browser.
I'm cautiously optimistic that the European Union will force Apple to do this in Europe. I don't know if Apple would bifurcate its market, or finally relent and allow full-blown browsers in the US that aren't Safari-based.
13 days later
- Best Answerset by Vlad
fredsmith999 I did some more digging in Orion iOS with Bypass Paywalls extension running, and @fredsmith999 is spot on. In addition to attempting to set the referer to google, there are other HTTP headers it tries to rewrite for some sites (e.g. removing all cookies from ft.com requests). The WebKit framework provided by Apple offers no way to rewrite these before it fetches the pages/data from the site you're visiting, so the site returns the paywalled version.
If Apple changes their stance on this and provides a way to provide header rewriting to browser apps, we'll be able to take another try at this.
8 months later
Bypass paywalls also does not work on Orion desktop anymore for at least the Wall Street Journal. Like other's have said, this is a pretty big deal breaker for me. The WSJ used to work as well.
strain I noticed this a few days ago. Occasionally, a website will make changes to its paywall to try to prevent "Bypass Paywalls Clean" from working. Usually, the developer identifies the problem and implements a fix within a few days. Because wsj.com is an important website, I'd expect the developer to act on this sooner rather than later. It should work again soon.
2 months later
Installed Orion browser on iOS. Problem is with extension: Magnolia's Bypass Paywall Clean
The extension works well on mac but not on iOS.
Tried both extensions from firefox store and from file but paywall is still there.
Link of a paywalled article: https://www.lescienze.it/news/2023/12/14/news/gatti_uccidono_specie-14554184/
Browser (main version): Orion 1.3.4
BPC-extension version: v3.4.7.0
How to fix this?
Paywall gone
1.3.4
17
Merged 1 post from Problem with BPC Bypass Paywall Clean on iOS with site: lescienze.it.
4 months later
on safari ios I use adguard with the bypass paywall filter list and it works pretty well.
it's a filter list for adguard, adnauseam and ublock so I don't know if can run on orion content blocker but maybe worth a try?
2 months later
Hast anyone made this work? https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
It works perfectly on Chrome on MacOS but on Orion for iOS it does not work. Does anyone know how to make it work?
9 months later
now that orion content blocker is evolved on mobile I get decent results with the bpc filterlist alone in some major newspapers
No one is typing