No need to remove the URL tracking parameters manually. 🥳
They should make this the default.
Or a setting that makes it the default.
I don’t like any software I use to destroy data (even tracking data) without my say so.
Hmm, I agree with you 100%, but power of defaults is how big companies get average consumers. Maybe Firefox should make it default with a setting to turn it on?
A setting titled “allow copying of tracking data”, a lot of people won’t allow.
Fight fire with fire.
This just:
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Encourages companies to try to work around it
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More importantly, possibly breaks important functionality
If you wanted to do this and make it default, I believe you should be able to do so using userChrome.css. You won’t be able to change the text, but you can remove the old menu item.
I’m unlikely to use the menu button, I generally use Ctrl+C/Cmd+C. I’ll have to poke around and see if there’s an option to set that shortcut.
Or at least the option to make it the default. I could see some situations where someone may want to test a link with non-identifying parameters (like identifying the campaign source), and not wanting to have that stripped from the URL by default.
But I get you, from a consumer perspective I’d also want it as my default.
In the meantime, there’s ClearURLs or uBlock Origin with filter lists.
Doesn’t it just clean up the link or does Firefox actually know which part of the link to remove?
There’s an addon I use for the Android version that does this by default.
It does miss some queryparams though but it dramatically reduces the URL size for the big offending sites.
But default is putting your cursor in the address bar and hitting ctrl-c. How would Firefox clean it like that?
It doesn’t.
If you think about it though, you’ve already visited that link so why clean it now.
Firefox user for many, many, many years. I tried chrome once and was dismayed at how sluggish it was, hogging ram & cpu.
FF just gets better and better with every update. I’m amazed that more people aren’t using it.
At my school, firefox on the computers are not updated at all so it’s using the very old firefox. Even then, it’s not that slow. Now the current update is way more modern but it does have the weird stuff like pocket and very weird advertisements bookmarked on the front page. You’ll get a much better experience after you do all the adjustments of removing everything and installing the proper extensions, maybe a little arkenfox too.
That’s interesting to hear. How come they aren’t updating?
Tbh I don’t mind those ‘ads’ you speak of, not sure if we’re talking about the same thing because for me it’s mostly articles, often quite interesting stuff that I wouldn’t have seen elsewhere. Will have a look into arkenfox now as never heard of that
Here’s an amazon link both without and with that feature being used, for comparison. (The tracking one was created in incognito mode, because I don’t know what sort of things it might reveal about me otherwise)
What do the parts it left on do? The encoding is innocuous enough but I don’t know what it’s doing with ref or th. I usually sanitize links myself and I’d have brought that one down to either
https://www.amazon.com/Bentgo®-Pop-Bento-Style-Compartments-Sustainable/dp/B0B3CLN8PX
or
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B3CLN8PX
, depending on how much I cared at the time. I kind of expected firefox to bring it down to the first version.
Not sure what th is, but ref is the referrer’s ID, which gives the referrer a referral / affiliate bonus if you purchase the item using that link. In theory it’s not a bad way to support the referrer and it’s not linked to you as an individual personally. You can remove it of course if you feel like they don’t deserve the money for referring you to a deal. In the end ref or no ref the price of the item remains the same for you.
I think firefox leaves the ref in intentionally.
I opened amazon in incognito then clicked on a random item from their front page, which was advertising their cyber monday deals at the time. In that case would it just be letting amazon know that that’s how I ended up on that page, without serving any other real purpose?
Hm, copying the first link “without site tracking” still gives me this:
Firefox is getting better every day
There’s also the ClearURLs add-on.
