News Sites are Annoying

Every news website spams you with popups asking you to subscribe, login, etc. This is annoying, but fortunately there is an easy way to bypass it: curl.

You can just run curl URL -O to save it as a file, and then open that file in Firefox. This works, but it requires some manual intervention. Unfortunately piping it into Firefox also does not work (because Firefox is a browser, not an actually good application that respects pipes — ugh!)

But we can tidy it into a script:

FILENAME=/tmp/$RANDOM.html
curl '$1' -o $FILENAME
firefox $FILENAME

Now, the Firefox add-on API does not just let you run a shell script. In theory, you could run a script (using JS — fucking browsers) to

• intercept certain URLs (you’d need to create such a list, and unfortunately it doesn’t seem there’s a Googleable list in plaintext)
• run the shell script shown above.

I don’t know if it’s worth writing a Firefox add-on when the API changes so fast. Maybe when I have more time — right now I shouldn’t be on these news sites anyway.