This is the direction we should be moving in.
Bravo.
Never cleans it the way I want
That’s partly why I continue to run my own URL-purging script in AutoHotkey.
I wish it was a bit more aggressive. For that I have an additional plugin ClearURLs (as linked by someone else in the replies BTW), but don’t know if its actually better or not.
Browsers should be designed from the start for the benefit of the users. There are too many “features” that only benefit the server owners. It’s been this way for a long time. Like the “Referer” header. Old as dirt, but how do I benefit from telling a server what page I was visiting beforehand?
I think the referrer header was originally meant for internal redirects within a website. Like you click on the add comment button but you’re not signed in, and after signing in the website can use the referrer to bring you back to the page you were on. Also useful for old school HTML form submissions that take you to the submission endpoint and then has to bring you back.
But early browser devs just didn’t have cross site isolation in mind (you can tell because when JS first came out, you could literally use it to take control of an iframe loaded by your page regardless of what domain the iframe was on) so tracking companies took advantage of that and now they think they’re entitled to it continuing to work that way because “it was always like that.”
It would be even better if it would do that automatically when hitting Ctrl+C in the address bar.
Hey did youbknow you can do that in a clipboard manager?
https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io/
You click on the clips with url and special paste - > Remove URL trackers
Demonstration
I’m using Linux
I have been told linux has an equivalent software for windows software so you should be good to go
That might be but judging by your screenshot this software doesn’t make it really easier to use this feature.
I didn’t know but actually
There is a way to assign keyboard shortcuts to special paste scripts
I just found out about it
So example
https://bruh-clips.com/clips/a95746d5
I just press the Ditto key -> CTRL+`
then I press h
That’s great! I have been using ClearURLs with varied success. Nice to see it built in .
It is pretty lame. I have a far more aggressive one written in python that I use in a shell window. One of these days I want to rewrite it in JS and turn it into a firefox extension.
It’s the bane of being built-in. You don’t have an extension page to explain to people that the link might not work anymore. You certainly also can’t assume that your users should know of such a possibility, because this can be clicked by any user.
I guess, there could be like a workflow where it opens the URL in a new tab and asks you, if it still works, but that’s also a good way to ensure your less techy users will not press that button again…
Nah, the Firefox thing just seems to have one or two rules, like remove utm_whatever=something parameters. If you expand that to 10 or 20 rules, some of which are site specific like cleaning ALL the parameters from ebay links and doing some similar rewriting with Amazon links, removing gclid and fclid from everything, retrieving the content of a few of the more common link shorteners and cleaning -that- up, etc., you can get a much less trashy experience with maybe 1 page of code. Adblock already does some of that with its site filtering. You don’t get everything, but a little bit goes a long way.
Well, apparently this is the list of parameters it strips: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-release/source/toolkit/components/antitracking/StripOnShareLists/LGPL/StripOnShareLGPL.json
Thanks that’s helpful. But there are a bunch of other important rewrites needed, like bypassing redirects.
If you’re on Android, this is a fantastic app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trianguloy.urlchecker
You set it as the default browser and it handles any link you click on that would normally open your browser directly with an intermediary step that strips tracking info, marketing campaign fluff, etc. Can also unshorten links or scan with Virus Total before you send yourself somewhere dodgy.
Can also choose another app to open the link in, so if it’s something a bit questionable you may prefer a super strict privacy browser instead of plain Firefox / Chrome / whatever too.
There are alors a few available on f-droid such as Untrack Me it can also transformed twitter links into Nitter.
