Offramp Autor: Erratic

Offramp rewrites a link to x.com or twitter.com into the same page on a Nitter mirror, before the request leaves Firefox. You read the post without X's scripts and without a login wall.

Public Nitter mirrors die all the time. Offramp treats that as the normal case. Your mirrors form a numbered list of exits, and links go to exit 1. When it stops answering, the tab moves to exit 2, then to the next, until a page loads. Press Check in the popup and each mirror shows its current response time, with a reading taken from status.d420.de, a public tracker that watches the Nitter network. The tracker may suggest changes to your list. The suggestions sit on the settings page until you press a button, and nothing edits your mirrors behind your back.

The smaller conveniences:

• Pictures load through the mirror's proxy instead of X's image servers.
• Tracking parameters get stripped from links before the mirror sees them.
• Right-click any X link to open it on a mirror in a new tab.
• A button in the popup pauses one tab. A keyboard shortcut pauses everything.
• Statistics, kept on your machine. A private window is never counted.
• Six colour palettes, each with a night half of its own, and the choice to follow your operating system. The test suite measures every colour against WCAG AA.

Offramp talks to one server you did not choose to visit, and that is the tracker above. It happens when you press Check. It also happens when you open an x.com link while the last reading is more than 15 minutes old, and settings can turn that second case off. The tracker sees your IP address. It does not learn which page you wanted, because the request carries nothing about it. There is no other traffic. Offramp has no server of its own and sends no analytics. If you want to verify any of this, open the installed package: every file in it is readable source.

Two gaps to know about. Offramp never touches video: a mirror signs its own video addresses with a private key, so an extension cannot build them. Whether video plays on a mirror page, and whether its bytes come through the mirror or straight from X's network, is each mirror's own configuration. Pages Nitter cannot show, notifications for example, stay on X. And since Firefox withholds host access at install, a first-run page asks you for it with one button before anything is rewritten.