Browser addon/extension to use web archive for reddit links
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.
16 replies
That's so awesome! Can it work on Firefox mobile browser?
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.
Edit: Firefox Android will not allow you to subscribe to any addon out of the box, below is a workaround.
Edit2: Workaround only works for Firefox Nightly as pointed out by pe1uca.
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.
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/
Right, now I remember why I started using Nightly.
It do work with more than recommended addons!
Ah, perfect!
I'll check then to also use nightly!
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.
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.
Not all heroes wear capes.
First of all, thank you for this. I just tested it out and it works fine.
I've just got a bit of a concern, however. If the use of this wonderful add-on spreads, wouldn't we be putting a lot of pressure on
archive.org?Yes, it might increase the load to archive.org.
Similar to lemmy, it'll be a time to optimize the stack and for more people to be aware of the its usefulness so with the banner they have when you look at a snapshot everyone can easily donate.
I see, thanks!
I oftentimes have to read or look at R*ddt threads, and I while I don't want to give Steve Huffman more money through my eyeballs, I also don't want to unnecessarily burden
archive.org(since I can't yet support them).Again, thanks for answering my question.
Nice!
Seems to work fine for me. Did some test googling with reddit appended and successfully (though it was slow) ended up on the archive.org version. Thank you!
I think it's Web archive taking a bit of time to load the snapshot, probably a screen/notification about the progress would be nice.
Oh neat! Thanks for doing this