Reddit updated the site for accounts using the Reddit Toolbar to begin receiving a warning. The warning appears at the top of a site above the Toolbar and states:
“The toolbar below is being discontinued and will stop working after June 26, 2015. Please update your bookmarks.”
The toolbar provides very useful functionality and ease of navigating the site. It allows you to upvote/downvote, save, hide, and view top comments on a link. You can also visit full comments or the full site. Most importantly, it tells you the title provided with the submission so you’re not just viewing a random image or site with no context. It complemented my navigation of the site by opening several interesting postings in new tabs and then going through the new tab. Without the toolbar, I may have no idea what I’m looking at or for or what the joke is.
The toolbar is not turned on by default for accounts and requires changing a preference to open links with the toolbar.
The toolbar is implemented as an iframe. The linked content is iframed into the bottom of the browser while the toolbar appears above. The URL is also changed to a special toolbar URL – which is what is being referred to for updating bookmarks. By iframing the content within Reddit, it broke certain sites such as Flickr and YouTube. More importantly, as Reddit brings the site to full HTTPS, the toolbar will not be compatible. It will be discontinued on June 26th. Along with the warning above the toolbar, this Deprecation Warning was posted with the Github commit:
Toolbar: Deprecation warning
As part of our efforts to move to full-site HTTPS, the reddit toolbar will be discontinued on June 26, 2015. The toolbar is not supported when using HTTPS.
HTTPS will be an improvement to the site but the toolbar being discontinued will be a loss to navigation for those that turned it on. There are some browser extensions and add-ons that can be considered as replacements.
Chrome
Firefox