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Comment by gcbw2 | Hacker News Reader

Since forever.

And they do it on the onClick event, so you are mislead to believe that the link is clean (as show on your status bar on link mouse over, until the very last second)

And they do that on GMail, calendar, and even on mobile apps such as google voice and hangouts. (i.e. if you long press and copy, it is a clean url, if you touch the link, it opens a tracking redirect on the browser --which chrome hides. But you should be using firefox on android as well)

Firefox (desktop and mobile) and Chorme (only desktop because google don't want you installing adblockers on their browsers) have an extension called "Skip Redirect" that works-around this problem.

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I think they just modify the status bar manually on hover. If you right-click a search result URL and copy it to the clipboard, it's the super long redirect URL, even as the browser status bar shows the URL you will be directed to.

I've wondered for a while how to do that. Is there a JavaScript function that modifies the status bar?

Yes. Though other commenters have said that it is only supported on some browsers.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/stat...

thanks

I just tried it and right clicking a search result gives me the direct URL, not the super long redirect URL. That only happens if you click it.

It depends on the browser. some browsers allow JS code to fool the status bar url, others do not.

If you are using a browser that prevents status bar fooling, you will be able to copy the original link and middle click to avoid tracking. If your browser allows it, then everything will include tracking.

> extension called "Skip Redirect" works-around this problem

Thanks for mentioning that. Google is the the one site where I want it to always work, but it seems the extension has a limitation with Google's links.

At least with Firefox under Windows 7, if you click on a Google link, it won't skip the redirect. It does skip the redirect if you open the link in a new tab, or if you copy the link location, then paste and go from the address bar. Has anyone else noticed this? Maybe I need to tell the author of the extension.

> an extension called "Skip Redirect"

[mouth open emoji]

Smacking my head that I never thought to look for such an extension. Thanks!

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