One of the many reasons I like Mozilla Firefox is that there are a variety of useful extensions that improve one’s experience on the web. One of these “killer extensions” is Redirector, which allows arbitrary redirects for specific websites using the power of regular expressions.
This may not sound like much, but it can be used to eliminate some small annoyances that come up more often than not.
While the power of the extension allows it to replace several other dedicated extensions, the configuration can be a bit overwhelming at first, here are my use cases as an example on how to use Redirector to have web servers actually serving you again.
Desktop Wikipedia for Desktop Computers
Wikipedia has a dedicated subdomain for mobile devices (e.g. en.m.wikipedia.org), which is very useful to read the text-heavy pages of the online encyclopaedia. However, this also means that desktop users get to “enjoy” the mobile experience when they follow a m.wikipedia.org link, even though the regular desktop version would be more suited for them.
Using the following redirect, this can easily be solved:
- Redirect:
^https?://(.+).m.wikipedia.org/(.+)$ - to:
https://\$1.wikipedia.org/$2 - Example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Actually Useable Reddit
While the management and community of Reddit can be questionable or outright toxic, for many (niche) topics it has not yet been replaced by a more suitable website. However, the “new” layout is in my opinion inferior to the “old” layout, especially for text-heavy communities.
The following redirect forces Reddit to be displayed using the old layout wherever possible:
- Redirect:
^(?:https?://)(?:www.)?reddit.com(.*)$ - to:
https://old.reddit.com$1 - Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox → https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox
This redirect obviously will only work as long as old.reddit.com is operational, but I am confident that a shutdown of the old layout would either enable suitable competitors or third-party front-ends to rise.
Avoid the Dark Patterns of Twitter
In my opinion, it would be a net gain for society if Twitter were to disappear without replacement, but sometimes it may be necessary to use the site to view a post referenced elsewhere.
To avoid the dark patterns used by Twitter, one can use a third-party front-end such as Nitter to view posts and accounts. This redirect takes away the work of having to change the URL to nitter.net each time one is linked to Twitter:
- Redirect:
^(?:https?://)(?:www.)?twitter.com/(.*)$ - to:
https://nitter.net/$1 - Example: https://twitter.com/dprk_news → https://nitter.net/dprk_news
Again, this will only work as long as Nitter is able to access Twitter data, but changing to a different third-party front-end is only a matter of adapting the redirect.