arkadiyt / free-ft

free-ft

Table of contents

• Overview
• Installation

Overview

This chrome extension gives you free access to unlimited Financial Times (https://www.ft.com) articles. I built it as an exercise to learn Chrome's manifest v3 declarativeNetRequest - the new way to manage or block network requests which will eventually deprecate webRequest.

All the logic lives in rules.json and performs 3 things:

1. sets a Referer: https://twitter.com header on all ft.com requests, for which FT grants open access.

2. drops Set-Cookie response headers on ft.com - otherwise FT sets cookies to limit you to 1 article.

3. sends a Cookie: FTCookieConsentGDPR=true cookie on requests - this prevents FT from giving you a GDPR cookie popup.

Installation

I have no plans of publishing this on the Chrome web store. If you want to install this extension you may do so locally by:

1. Cloning this repo

2. Going into your chrome extension settings (chrome://extensions/) and checking the "Developer mode" slider in the upper right corner

3. Clicking the "Load unpacked" button that appeared in the upper left corner and selecting the folder you cloned this repo into.

free-ft's Issues

Doesn't work with *.ft.com

Sites like markets.ft.com continue to show the GDPR even if they have the same cookie to set (FTCookieConsentGDPR).
Any idea?

Free Access to FT and other newspapers

I am struggling to get the access, it doesn't work anymore. On the extension there is a message of error: "Manifest version 2 is deprecated, and support will be removed in 2024. See https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate/mv2-deprecation-timeline for details."
So I don't believe Bypass Paywalls 1.8.1 is working anymore I am afraid.
Thank you.

Stopped working, it seems?

Donno, if it's just me, or FT indeed changed something about their articles handling.. :)