Wanted to share the libredirect Firefox plugin, for abandoning Youtube.
Wanted to share the libredirect Firefox plugin, for abandoning Youtube.
A web extension that redirects YouTube, Twitter, Instagram... requests to alternative privacy friendly frontends and backends
This is a plugin I found recently and really enjoy. It gives you the opportunity to redirect several webpages to alternatives. For example Youtube to FreeTube or Piped. If I search for youtube in Firefox, FreeTube automatically opens and shows me my feed. I like it, I use it, I can recommend it.
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I keep thinking about installing this, but the required permissions seem a bit excessive:
This add-on needs to:
- Input data to the clipboard
- Access your data for all websites
Anyone know if the 'All Access' permission is really required for what this is doing? It just feels wrong. There isn't some sort of "Control Navigation for These Domains" that it could request for each enabled site or something is there?
"Access your data for all websites" is important because otherwise it doesn't know what domain you're on in the first place.
Access browser tabs
Access browser activity during navigationare enough to do that.
Maybe the devs don't know that. Could you open an issue on this?
Asking you because you may know more about these permissions than me.I've been using the addon for some time, and while it's good now, there were some silly mistakes in the past. What I'm trying to say is that maybe they're just relatively a beginner, and it haven't yet occurred to them to revisit the permissions.
I went through the issues. Indeed what I said was all you need for redirecting from YouTube et al, but now it also checks every single libre instance you go to and goes to somewhere else if the instance is down.
Shouldn’t it just require access to i.e. YouTube.com and not a blanket everything? This is what other extensions do.
It can redirect a dozen other services too
Just add them to the list. They have to code separate rules anyway.
It doesn't just work on YouTube, you can set up redirects for any pair of sites. I use a similar extension for Twitter -> Nitter and to redirect several Fandom wikis to their forks instead.
It's open source, you can ask the author and other users about it too (if you can't read the code yourself)
Oh, I'm confident(-ish) in my ability to review the code, but as I understand it I have no way to guarantee that the code that's on github is the code that AMO installs. Plus updates are automatic, so I have no way to ensure that something malicious won't be added anyway.
You can build it yourself from source then.
You can only do that with Firefox Developer, can't you? And IIRC, they self uninstall after a week or something, don't they?
You can either install it unsigned with Firefox Developer Edition and it will be permanent. Or you can sign it yourself (you don’t need to publish it on AMO): https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/signing-and-distribution-overview/ and it will work on regular Firefox.
Addon files (.xpi files) are zip packages of the addons. They should contain the script files without obfuscation (I think this is an AMO policy), besides any resources and the addon manifest file.
The only thing that would be harder to inspect I think is webassembly files.I think you can still build the extension package and upload it yourself
It's open-source so you don't need to worry