Recently, some ad-blocker extensions were banned from being installed for Chinese users on the Firefox browser, while they can still be downloaded and installed by users outside of China. The reason is likely due to complaints from Chinese video websites, which caused Firefox to modify access permissions to ban Chinese users from installing them.
In fact, banning or removing extensions due to copyright issues is not uncommon. For example, the well-known extension “Bypass Paywalls Firefox Clean” was recently deleted.
The core function of “Bypass Paywalls Firefox Clean” is to bypass the paywall on some paid websites. These websites require a membership subscription to read the content, and without a subscription, users cannot access it. “Bypass Paywalls Firefox Clean” can bypass the paywall and load the full text of the article directly.
The extension can bypass the paywall on several hundred websites, which can cause losses for the paid websites. Therefore, they filed complaints and eventually led Mozilla to remove the extension.
However, for users who are willing to take the effort, this is not a problem because they can still download the XPI file of “Bypass Paywalls Firefox Clean” from Gitlab and manually install it, which can still be used normally after installation.
In addition to supporting Firefox, “Bypass Paywalls Firefox Clean” also supports Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and even iOS/iPadOS. By adding filter rules to ad-blocking extensions, users can still bypass the paywall on various platforms.