I've been using the 'ClearURLs' FF addon for quite a while now, and it gives you the URLs back in the results.
I recommend reading more than the headline
What is "that" you say wouldn't work?
The extension can work fine by requesting every goto link upfront. As far as your google searches go, this is just as private as before.
I would recommend you avoid judging a comment because of a metric it neither said nor implied.
That no longer is possible, you must ask google.com for consent to visit the result link before seeing what the final target URL is.
And it can still prevent google from knowing which search results you click on, even though OP didn't mention that feature.
We’ve had redirecting trackers like bit.ly for over a decade and the extension didn’t address it then.
It's not your mom being a bike, it's a bike with flat tires being a bike.
I bet the reason it doesn't do redirects right now is that the situations you find redirects in have usually been places where investigating them loses privacy. But if these were fresh links already personal to your search, checking all the redirects is fully private.
How do you figure? How else could it possibly work now?
You do a google search. The extension resolves every link on the page immediately via the goto urls. This doesn't leak any information to google because they obviously know which links they sent you. Now the links are resolved and you can copy and click them and get clean URLs, without sending any information about which ones you're copying or clicking.
In my second comment?
I was replying to a detailed explanation of the old mechanism that ended with "that is no longer possible", so I said "it doesn't need to use that exact mechanism" referring to the old mechanism.
It needs to update to the new way things work. But that's fine. An extension that performs the same task is still fully possible.
The article also suggests that it cannot be decoded.