HN Feature that might be helpful: you can click the "web" link underneath the article title that will launch a web search for the article. Clicking through from the search results will normally let you read an article without the paywall.
Although Google took it out of the Chrome store it's still up on Github[1]. All you have to do is download the zip file, change the extension to "crx", and then install.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/paywall-pass/
Feature suggestion: change the text to 'search' instead of 'web'.
Yeah "google" may be good since the intent is to get around pay walls. That or some sort of phrase like "search url" or something less awkward that I apparently can't think of.
Firefox and Chrome, unfortunately, when doing auto-complete in the address bar, highlight the auto-completed part, overwriting your clipboard. This becomes a problem when you copy something and then open a new tab and begin to type out the URL of the site where you intended to use the copied string.
My way of dealing with this problem has been to add shortcuts on the new tab page to the sites where I frequently want to use copied content; archive.is, reddit and HN as well as a few others. That way I can at least navigate to those sites without touching the address bar.
One could of course turn off auto-complete in the browsers but aside from the situation mentioned above, auto-complete is such a useful feature.
I wish the browsers could find another way of implementing the auto-complete, not overwriting clipboard, but still retaining easy removal of the auto-completed part of the string.
Also, while we're on the subject of browsers and text highlight, I wish the drag-and-drop-ability of links from the webpage could be turned off by the user. Sometimes I want to start highlighting in the middle of a hyperlinked text. I never want to drag the link anywhere. I still like being able to drop files into the browser, though -- either to open them in the browser or to drop them onto an upload area of a page.
What works in Germany, though, is pressing "share via email" and using that link.