Personally, I have found this feature to be too limited. I still use the ClearURLs extension, which is more effective in my experience.
However, neither one is a silver bullet. Here’s an example I just took from Amazon (I blocked out some values with X’s):
Original URL:
https://www.amazon.com/Hydro-Flask-Around-Tumbler-Trillium/dp/B0C353845H/ref=XXXX?qid=XXXXXXXXXX&refinements=p_XXXXXXXXXXXXX&rps=1&s=sporting-goods&sr=XXXUsing Firefox’s “copy link without site tracking” feature:
https://www.amazon.com/Hydro-Flask-Around-Tumbler-Trillium/dp/B0C353845H/ref=XXXX?qid=XXXXXXXXXX&refinements=p_XXXXXXXXXXXXX&rps=1&s=sporting-goodsUsing ClearURLs:
https://www.amazon.com/Hydro-Flask-Around-Tumbler-Trillium/dp/B0C353845H?refinements=p_XXXXXXXXXXXXX&rps=1The ideal, canonical URL, which no tools I’m familiar with will reliably generate:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C353845HLonger but still fully de-personalized URL:
https://www.amazon.com/Hydro-Flask-Around-Tumbler-Trillium/dp/B0C353845HIf anybody knows a better solution that works with a wide variety of sites, please share!
This will just push websites to change the orders and names of their query params (maybe regularly).
I don’t think one can safely omit all query params from all sites and expect a decent experience across all websites.
You are fighting a good fight, I salute you, but query params (the part of the url where the identifiers are included) are a valid and core part of Internet addresses. Trying to strip them away universally will only work for so long.
I think that’s why you haven’t found a tool that meets all your needs yet, because many sites have legitimate uses for those params that don’t include tracking. You’ll probably need tools designed specifically for Amazon and other specific websites/services.
Oh yes, definitely. I think this is why Mozilla has not made this the default behavior in Firefox; there will always be the risk of false-positives breaking copied links, so it’s important that people know that there’s some kind of mutation happening.
ClearURLs uses a JSON file with site-specific regex patterns and rules. In theory I could customize this for myself, or better yet submit a pull request on their GitHub. If I have time I’ll look into it.
uBlock Origin filter lists is what seems to work best. You get nothing but the raw URL.
To be honest it should not be that hard to write a browser extension that just strips away all query parameters. That’s just a simple string match for the question mark and deleting everything after it.
The problems begin when sites start implementing other URL shenanigans like your /ref=XXXX? example.
The workable solution there would be to have the extension match user defined patterns for different sites.
The problem with a nuclear solution like that is that some sites use query parameters as actual query parameters. Like DuckDuckGo.
Yeah, though that should only be an issue if the link you’re copying needs to show query results instead of a more permanent page such as a product listing or a video on YouTube.
In general, the conventions and standards are followed. But yeah, linking to search results without tracking bullshit is kind of challenging.
Awesome. Would be nice to remove some of those useless options. (Stop trying to make Pocket happen, please)
I don’t think, they need to ‘make Pocket happen’. At least, I assume, it’s already generating income for them, which makes them somewhat less dependent on search engine deals, which is what they want from it.
Anyways, if you want the buttons to be hidden, you can disable
extensions.pocket.enabledin about:config.
Can I make it the default?
It really should be “copy link” and “copy link with tracking”.
Not at the moment. You’ll have to use ClearURLs or uBlock Origin filter lists if you don’t wanna have to right click.
More here: https://lemmy.world/comment/5626180
Huge Firefox fan here. I can’t help but feel this is some junky attention grabbing “feature”. Like… Surely there’s a better implementation than a redundand long-ass right-click menu option.
Plenty of plugins will do the same thing quietly for every link you ever interact with anyway…
True, just make it default, and a separate button if you really want to send ref-links for example.
The problem is that it will sometimes remove parameters that aren’t tracking parameters. It won’t happen often, but if it happens, that can be really bad.
Just imagine someone copying a link, pasting it into a document and only noticing several months later, that the link doesn’t anymore resolve to what they wanted.If you install a plugin for this, then you’ll know to check that the link still works before documenting it somewhere. But rolling this out as the default for millions of unsuspecting users, that is just an entirely different story…
I like the idea of this (and it’s been in stable for over a month) but in practice I never use it. It leaves way too many things in.
One easy example is discord images. Go to discord, find an image you or someone else posted, and open it in firefox. After the extension they add a bunch of extra stuff on. Firefox will leave it all on even if you select “Copy without site tracking”, while you can easily just manually copy up to the extension and no further.
I get that they have to strike a balance between removing parts of the link and preserving functionality, and that they can’t always know what extra data in the link is being used for - but I think that just means this is something that’ll always be better done manually.
Nice.
That’s all those little link suffixes right? Can you turn this option into the default so you don’t have 2 options? I don’t think I’ve ever had a use case for sharing a link while telling my friends where I found it.
Everything after the final slash is data. This data is stored in key/value pairs, where the key is a variable name that is expected in the server’s code and the characters following the “=“ is the encrypted value. Each pair is separated by an encrypted “&”, or “&”. Many times this string of values begins with a “?”.
https://example.com/path/to/item/?id=568953&name=shjbxsdhjhcdf&xyz=djkkgcdtjnSo we can maybe guess what the values might be but only if we know what the keys mean, and then we’d have to give exactly the right data for each key (id, name, xyz). For all we know the most important piece of data in that string is
xyzand it may be required, but we don’t know that so we strip the whole query string off and now have a useless URL.Mostly, stripping off the query string should be fine if the path to the item you’re looking for is enough. Like the amazon example in the other comment. Other times, not so much.
Sorry for the novel, I can explain more if you’d like.
Yeah that’s what I was thinking as well. Amazon and YouTube are the only two I know of that use those strings for specific pages or content.
In general, you see it more often for older websites or older server software, because we only really worked out around the year 2010 or so, that essential information for identifying a resource should be placed in the path.
Beforehand, it was largely something that webpage authors decided based on gut feeling…
Yup. I’m copying some Audible links now and the ampersand isn’t encrypted and the query string starts after the ? instead of the last slash, so there are different ways of doing it. We couldn’t guess at that, though! :)
