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Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

Probably because there are other methods for Chrome that don't apply to Firefox.

Like when I noticed that some sites did some URL rewriting trickery on Firefox and others browsers, but not for Chrome. The trick is to show you the proper URL the link points to, but as you click, it is substituted for one that is a redirection, for tracking purposes (ex: "https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http:://actualsite..."). On Chrome, they don't need to use these tricks as the browser supports the "ping" attribute of links, so they can do their tracking without rewriting the URL.

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This kind of BS is why I don't ever click on links directly. I copy/paste them instead, so I can examine and trim them. Often, the actual link is through some sort of redirection service and I need to copy/paste the text the browser shows for the link rather than the actual link.

There's so much trickery and nonsense around this stuff that no link is safe to just click on.

Check out the Privacy Badger extension. I believe it removes the tracking stuff from (some) links.

There are also dedicated link cleaning extensions (I use Neat Url).

You actually don't need to use any dedicated extensions for that, as this functionality is built into uBO, you just need to find a filter list (just search for "ublock origin clearurl list" or whatever)

Does it work on links copied from the page for chats?

I use privacy badger, but it doesn't cover everything so I end up having to manually check all links anyway.

I've also noticed this behavior popping up a lot lately, but I had no idea why. The URL with tracking included was still blocked by uBlock Origin, but having to manually copy-paste the relevant portion was an annoyance.

Thanks for the context!

Check out ClearURLs extension.

Wow, that is pretty disgusting behavior.

The web developer interprets missing features as damage and polyfills around them.

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