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Comment by TechBro8615 | Hacker News Reader

I wish I had this for Twitter links in iOS Safari. It's so difficult to scroll to the right and delete all the query parameters. I also wish Apple would give me a way to expand the URL bar to a word-wrapped input that takes up half the screen. I can't stand highlighting text in that tiny little box.

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> I wish I had this for Twitter links in iOS Safari.

[self-promotion] My extension StopTheMadness does this: https://apps.apple.com/app/stopthemadness-mobile/id158308293...

I can recommend this. Does lots of other useful things too.

I actually have this installed! But I disabled it for some reason that I can't remember; I think the defaults were too aggressive and I meant to come back and configure it more precisely when I had the time. I still need to do that... thanks for making it!

The other extension I can absolutely recommend is Vinegar, which replaces hostile video players like the one on YouTube (which injects JS to close itself if you attempt to use picture-in-picture) with a native HTML5 video element.

> replaces hostile video players like the one on YouTube (which injects JS to close itself if you attempt to use picture-in-picture) with a native HTML5 video element.

StopTheMadness also does this. ;-)

Does it include a quality picker? Vinegar does more than just put a <video> tag in

Yes, check out the link above. Auto-select YouTube highest video quality, show video controls for all sites (not just YouTube), stop autoplaying videos for all sites (which also skips YouTube ads), etc.

I’m guessing a side effect will be that SponsorBlock doesn't work anymore with this enabled?

I think it would still work, though I can't say for sure. In any case, it may become superfluous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35085475

It should be noted that while the effects are similar on YouTube, StopTheMadness and Vinegar operate in significantly different ways.

FYI/YSK:

When youre on a video with forced ads where you cannot skip through them, go PiP on the video and use the arrow keys to scrub left or right...

I discovered this, then talked to a buddy at netflix, and he said that coding for PiP was a pain because PiP doesnt abide by DRM rules.

What would be cool is the ability to pipe a PiP to VLC and then use VLC to save out a video....

So you can take a screenshot with PiP without triggering the safeguards?

Report back with your findings.

But if you have any idea how to "pipe a PiP to VLC" let me know...

I'd like to figure out how to "pipe a PiP"

Does something like that exist for Reddit? Whatever it is they use on their website is a janky piece crap.

Looks great! Is the one purchase price for use across iOS and MacOS? Or two separate purchases?

Separate purchases.

Does it work in firefox ios? (Hoping webview makes it work but dont really understand extensions on ios)

No, just Safari.

Love this extension!

Nice. I'm a user and I also recommend it.

I'm curious how you get this to work:

"Stops URL shorteners. Checks the links you click in Safari for well-known link shorteners — bit.ly, tinyurl.com, t.co (used by Twitter), etc. — and loads the unshortened destination URL instead of the shortened URL. This occurs without setting any cookies or other site data, so you can't be tracked by your click."

How can you determine the destination without revealing any tracking info to the link shortening service? Unless you make the request from your backend, wouldn't the user's IP address be revealed to the shortening service, allowing it (or data brokers) to join it with other data about them?

The IP address is revealed, yes. But there's no other data: no JavaScript, no referer headers, no cookies, URL tracking tags are removed before and after, etc.

I don't have any backend. The extension code is all local on your device and doesn't phone home to me. I don't aim to provide VPN service.

I’ve been using  Shortcuts to do this for a while now. Here’s my “Share Clean URL” shortcut: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/b1bcc002fe894f11858721c0b14...

> It's so difficult to scroll to the right and delete all the query parameters.

A lot of times, all that's needed is to insert a # character at the right place in the URL, then load that.

If you can get to the right place that conveniently, Shift+End Delete works without a page load. But getting their is its own minor inconvenience.

I made a Shortcut to strip links. You can add it to the share sheet. It'll give you a new share sheet with the stripped link. Much faster than mashing backspace.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/528c9af856fc46c9a3d164a85e8...

Safari have it built in for many pages, all that publish a rel-canonical will see Safari share that URL instead – as a way to avoid sharing AMP URL:s I believe

Bad that Twitter isn’t publishing such or is publishing it with tracking

I'm not sure it's even Twitter's fault. Usually it happens when I click an embedded Tweet from a blog post and then copy the URL from the URL bar. It's the blog that adds the tracking data. (Does anyone know why a blog would even care to do that? Does Twitter offer some kind of analytics dashboard where you can segment views of your tweets based on query parameters?)

Twitter adds some crap on automatically whenever you click "Copy link to Tweet"

Also, they do have an analytics dashboard: https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-measurement-an...

Oh, if you copy from the URL bar then you will always get the exact URL on iOS Safari, but if you copy it from the share sheet you will get the cleaner one

Are there any iOS Safari extensions that do this? Hyperweb comes to mind, though I don't know if they offer this specific feature.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35085280

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