“Copy Link Without Site Tracking” now on @firefox ! 🙌
Nice.
It already has been out for like a few months
That’s all those little link suffixes right? Can you turn this option into the default so you don’t have 2 options? I don’t think I’ve ever had a use case for sharing a link while telling my friends where I found it.
Everything after the final slash is data. This data is stored in key/value pairs, where the key is a variable name that is expected in the server’s code and the characters following the “=“ is the encrypted value. Each pair is separated by an encrypted “&”, or “&”. Many times this string of values begins with a “?”.
https://example.com/path/to/item/?id=568953&name=shjbxsdhjhcdf&xyz=djkkgcdtjn
So we can maybe guess what the values might be but only if we know what the keys mean, and then we’d have to give exactly the right data for each key (id, name, xyz). For all we know the most important piece of data in that string is xyz and it may be required, but we don’t know that so we strip the whole query string off and now have a useless URL.
Mostly, stripping off the query string should be fine if the path to the item you’re looking for is enough. Like the amazon example in the other comment. Other times, not so much.
Sorry for the novel, I can explain more if you’d like.
Yeah that’s what I was thinking as well. Amazon and YouTube are the only two I know of that use those strings for specific pages or content.
In general, you see it more often for older websites or older server software, because we only really worked out around the year 2010 or so, that essential information for identifying a resource should be placed in the path.
Beforehand, it was largely something that webpage authors decided based on gut feeling…
Awesome. Would be nice to remove some of those useless options. (Stop trying to make Pocket happen, please)
I don’t think, they need to ‘make Pocket happen’. At least, I assume, it’s already generating income for them, which makes them somewhat less dependent on search engine deals, which is what they want from it.
Anyways, if you want the buttons to be hidden, you can disable extensions.pocket.enabled in about:config.
Huge Firefox fan here. I can’t help but feel this is some junky attention grabbing “feature”. Like… Surely there’s a better implementation than a redundand long-ass right-click menu option.
Plenty of plugins will do the same thing quietly for every link you ever interact with anyway…
The problem is that it will sometimes remove parameters that aren’t tracking parameters. It won’t happen often, but if it happens, that can be really bad.
Just imagine someone copying a link, pasting it into a document and only noticing several months later, that the link doesn’t anymore resolve to what they wanted.
If you install a plugin for this, then you’ll know to check that the link still works before documenting it somewhere. But rolling this out as the default for millions of unsuspecting users, that is just an entirely different story…
