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by michaelteter 498 days ago
CNNs new paywall essentially locks up Firefox on iOS.

Once their paywall pops up, I cannot do anything with the app except swipe left to go back. The Firefox menu is inaccessible as are any other features of the browser.

This is the most hostile UI I have seen in years; and I will quickly learn to never click any CNN link.
3 comments
Y_Y 498 days ago
I would also blame Firefox (or underlying Safari) for this. The browser shouldn't cede control to the page, even things like modifying the right-click menu are iffy and should be easy to override.
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marcosdumay 497 days ago
It's incredibly hard to decide what is a reasonable event to handle and what is "ceding control to the page".

Even more because for most of those events, handling just a handful of them is perfectly fine and will improve your experience in a web app. Sometimes even conditionally handling them all is still perfectly fine.

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Y_Y 497 days ago
Maybe I don't want my experience "improved". I have never been glad my scrollbar was hijacked, or that the behaviors of the "back" button was changed.
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marcosdumay 496 days ago
> I have never been glad my scrollbar was hijacked

Well, maybe not you, but almost everybody praises scroll to zoom in map applications.

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Y_Y 496 days ago
> almost everybody praises scroll to zoom in map applications

In what sense is that true?

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the8472 497 days ago
On desktop shift+rightclick overrides context menu event handlers.
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ge96 497 days ago
Tangent: In win10 when you right-click the menu is massive, it's the full height of the window not sure if that was a bug

Edit: menu as in "open link in new tab"

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ericrallen 497 days ago
You can replace the `www.` in the URL with `lite.` to get the text-only version[0] which has no ads, no paywall, and no images.

Not sure if it will continue to work for the paywalled articles, but it’s a much more pleasant reading experience if you do find a CNN article you want to read.

[0]: https://lite.cnn.com/2025/01/30/science/spacex-starship-expl...

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walrus01 497 days ago
Page works perfectly fine with Firefox on Android, with ublock origin, which also seems to strip out the paywall
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