Old Reddit Redirect: keeping the old Reddit layout without a redirect

Why redirecting stopped being an option

The core of this project is a small workaround for a policy change, and the README states the policy change plainly. Reddit now requires an account to use old.reddit.com. So instead of sending you there, the extension opts you out of the redesign, which makes www.reddit.com serve the old design itself. That distinction is the whole design and it is worth understanding before deciding whether the extension is for you. A redirect to old.reddit.com was a bookmark and a rewrite of URLs, and it worked until the account requirement turned it into a dead end for anyone not signed in. Opting out is a different mechanism: the browser stays on www.reddit.com and asks Reddit to serve the old design, so the reader gets the layout without a second hostname and without an account. The README says it works when navigating to the site, when opening links and when using old bookmarks, and that it works regardless of whether you are logged in, and in incognito mode.

Version 3.0.0 was a rewrite, and the permissions changed with it

The README opens with a note that answers the question every long-time user of this extension eventually asks, which is why the permissions changed recently. Version 3.0.0 has been rewritten from scratch to keep old Reddit working while logged out, and because the way it works has changed its permissions needed to as well. This is worth understanding as a design constraint rather than as a quirk. The previous approach, redirecting, could be done with a small set of URL-level permissions. The current approach, opting out of the redesign at the site itself, requires the extension to influence how Reddit serves pages, which is a deeper level of control and therefore a broader permission set. If you are reviewing the extension before installing it, the permission list will look different from the older version, and the reason is the mechanism rather than a change in what the extension does for you. The rewrite was the price of keeping the feature available to logged-out readers.

Switching between old and new Reddit, and the small fixes

Using the extension is a single interaction, which is unusual for something that rewrites a whole site. You click the extension's icon to switch between old and new Reddit, so the override is under your control at the moment you want it rather than baked in permanently. Alongside that, the README lists a few minor fixes and quality of life improvements, and they are the kind that tell you what the author actually spent time on. One removes the undismissable cookie banner, which is a known annoyance of the old interface that cannot be dismissed and follows you across pages. The other allows image URLs to be viewed as raw image files, which is a small thing that matters if you are working with direct links to images. Neither is a headline feature, and both are the sort of detail that only appears once someone has used the extension daily for a while.

What is in the repository

The repository is small and flat, which is what a browser extension of this kind looks like when it is not using a build framework. The top-level entries are a .gitignore, LICENSE.txt, a Makefile, the README, background.js, an img/ directory, manifest.json, rules.json, styles.css, welcome.html and welcome.js. The two files that carry the behaviour are background.js, the extension's background script, and rules.json, which by its name holds the rules applied to page requests. styles.css holds the styling for whatever the extension injects, and the welcome page with its own script is the first-run surface. The manifest is what declares the permissions the README explains were widened in 3.0.0, and the fact that the extension is shipped to both the Chrome Web Store and Firefox Add-ons as separate listings is consistent with a project that maintains one codebase across two manifest targets. The primary language is JavaScript and the licence is MIT, with the code copyright Tom Watson.

Working on the extension locally

The development instructions are brief because the build is. The README asks that you ensure you have node installed, then says to run make run to start the live-reloading development server, and that this will open a browser window with the extension installed for testing. The Makefile shows what that command does, since the run target is a single line invoking the Firefox extension tooling:

	npx web-ext run

Two other targets exist. The clean target removes the generated zip archives, and there is a target that builds old-reddit-redirect.zip from the JSON, JS, HTML and CSS files and the img/ directory, excluding the git metadata and a screenshot. That packaging target is how a submission to a browser store is assembled, and the fact that the zip is produced by a plain shell rule rather than a build tool confirms how little machinery the project needs. The README's closing instruction is the normal fork and pull request flow, and the live-reload loop means you can change the rules and see the effect on a real Reddit page within seconds.

Where the extension is the wrong answer

Three limits are obvious and one is not. The obvious ones are that this is an argument with a redesign rather than a client for Reddit, so the current features, the current navigation and the current media handling are all out of reach while it is on, and that it needs browser extension support at all, so a locked-down corporate browser or a phone with no store access is out of scope even though the desktop case is well covered. The less obvious one is the fragility of the mechanism. The extension asks Reddit to serve the old design, and that is a request to a service whose own product direction runs the other way. When Reddit changes how the opt-out is honoured, or retires the old design entirely, the extension stops working, and there is no fallback in the repository because the whole project is the fallback. A user who depends on the old layout for accessibility reasons, for example, should treat it as a temporary bridge rather than a permanent solution, and the account requirement that motivated the rewrite is itself a sign that the old design is on borrowed time.

Editorial conclusion

Old Reddit Redirect suits someone who wants the old Reddit interface and does not want to be signed in to get it, since the whole point of the rewrite was to make the old design available while logged out. It is the wrong tool if you need Reddit's current features, since the extension is an argument with the redesign rather than a client for it, and it is the wrong tool for a managed browser where extensions are locked down. Verify first which browser and which store you install from, since the extension ships separately for Chrome and Firefox, and note that the extension works by opting out of the redesign rather than by redirecting, so a change on Reddit's side to how that opt-out is honoured would affect it, and the repository has no GitHub releases with the last push on 2026-08-28.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. License: MIT
3. README
4. tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect on GitHub