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Redirects of all types are especially bad on mobile devices since they require a pointless new round trip, which anecdotally seems to double the amount of time it takes for a webpage to start loading.

Since Facebook and many other services do this on their mobile apps by default, I am surprised I don't hear more complaints about it. Twice through the cell tower is too long.

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I couldn't agree more. I looked a short while ago for a firefox extension which just looks for a url in the body of an anchor link, then alerts you if the htef attribute is different. Couldn't find one or be stuffed writting one, but was bemused about the relative lack of info on the topic.

My last straw using Google Chrome, was when I noticed that the browsers "could not load webpage" (e.g. When you don't have an Internet connection) redirects through Google when I click the "try reloading the page". I dunno if they still do it, but that was crossing the line for me.

Thanks to google's recent shenenigan's, I've switched to using StartPage. Which, at least for now, is google without big brother tracking. Although I'm sure if it gets popular, google will stop them.

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