[steveridout]

I understand where you're coming from, but it's for purely technical reasons. The extension just plain wouldn't work without this enabled.

I avoided the "paste a URL" solution because that would mean that my server would need to fetch the content from other websites instead of each user's browser doing the work.

Until I have a better solution, for now you could resort to copying and pasting articles you'd like to read into the upload page: http://readlang.com/upload - it's not ideal perhaps, but should get the job done.