Read the Financial Times for Free using JavaScript Bookmarks

Photo by Hatice Yardım on Unsplash

In this tutorial, I will show you how you can access the Financial Times for free on your mobile browser using JavaScript bookmarks.

If you haven’t read my article on executing JavaScript using bookmarks yet, please do so now as you’ll need that knowledge moving forward.

Execute Custom JavaScript on Mobile Browsers Without Developer Tools

I will be using Safari and my iPhone for this tutorial, but the steps below should work for other phones and mobile browsers too. Let’s get started!

Financial Times

With the Financial Times, things are a bit more straightforward.

Add the following bookmark to your browser:

javascript:window.location='https://google.com/search?q='+window.location.href;

To use this bypass, go to FT.com, click on any article, and then click the bookmark. You will be redirected to a Google search of the article. Click the corresponding search result, and you will now have access to the article.

This works because of web crawlers and content indexing. For the Financial Times and its articles to appear in Google’s search results, they will need Google’s crawlers to index the content of their articles. When we click on the article through Google’s search results, Financial Times will look at our referrer (Google.com) and let us access the article.

(This works using Bing too, but not with DuckDuckGo or any of the other more privacy-oriented search engines that I know of, so we’re going to have to pick between getting tracked by Google or Microsoft.)

(There’s actually a pretty simple way to fix this, and it’s to check not just the referrer, but also the user agent of the request. But let’s not give FT any ideas!)

Help! The method stops working after a while!

This sometimes happens, and it’s because FT has stored some cookies on your device which identified that you are not some person coming from Google.

To fix this, simply close all your FT tabs, and clear your cookies for ft.com in the Settings > Safari > Advanced > Website Data section:

Clearing cookies and cache for FT.com in Safari Settings

Closing

And there we have it! We’ve successfully bypassed paywalls for the Financial Times.

I hope this tutorial proves useful to all of you who want to access articles without paying for a subscription.

That being said, there are probably a bunch of other news sources out there that you may also want to access. But fear not! With a little bit of experimentation and research, and with the power of JavaScript, (almost) anything is possible.

Until next time!

Note: An older version of this article featured a bypass for WSJ paywalls, but that method has stopped working. However, the FT method still works.