No need to remove the URL tracking parameters manually. 🥳
Why would i ever have a link with tracking?
The fact is that there is no surefire way to get rid only of tracking parameters, because they can mix in with other legit ones that if removed would break the website you’re visiting.
Last I heard, Facebook had rolled out some encrypted URL parameters, so the collective mapping efforts to manually identify parameters only used for tracking on each different website could very well be nullified if many implement something evil as that
What do you mean? Tons of links on the web have trackers appended to the URL.
Pretty sure they are asking, “Why would I ever want the tracking copied, why is this relegated to a bespoke option instead of being the default behavior?”
I think it’s good to have a normal copy along with this remove tracking one. In case for some reason removing tracking messes something up with the link and makes it not work. It’s always nice to have options rather than just doing it automatically.
I noticed this feature in Brave first.
Indeed, but it’s true - Brave did bring this feature long ago. It’s a good thing for us, let multiple browsers try to one up each other on privacy focused features.
That’s true, this was one thing that was slightly annoying when I made the move from brave to Firefox. But I mean, I wouldn’t really characterise this as a reliable security feature. If you don’t manually check your URL before hitting return anyway, you’re going to be less secure than without the feature
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
There’s also the ClearURLs add-on.
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.
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.
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.
Doesn’t it just clean up the link or does Firefox actually know which part of the link to remove?
