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Is the Web Heading Toward Redirect Hell?

Posted by timothy on from the here-let-me-bounce-you-a-few-times dept.

Ant snips from Royal Pingdom this excerpt: "Google is doing it. Facebook is doing it. Yahoo is doing it. Microsoft is doing it. And soon Twitter will be doing it. We're talking about the apparent need of every web service out there to add intermediate steps to sample what we click on before they send us on to our real destination. This has been going on for a long time and is slowly starting to build into something of a redirect hell on the Web. And it has a price."

4 of 321 comments (clear)

  1. How do you get offenders to stop? by alain94040 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Funny just this morning I noticed that it took at least 5 redirects or more for Google to let me login to Analytics. It felt like my browser had a life of its own!

    The real problem though are the link shorteners. I'd like to vote with my feet and never click on them, but for many, they are like drugs, because they let you track your influence (how many people clicked) in real-time. It's especially bad on slower connections such as smartphones. Not everyone has 1MB/s.

    Any ideas on how to convince people to stop?

    --
    Don't work on your startup project without a safety net

    1. Re:How do you get offenders to stop? by dyingtolive · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Nice. If that got turned into a firefox plugin to realtime decrypt the links...

      --
      Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
  2. Why it has to be so technically impractical? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Less fragile and less of an unnecessary intermediary on this Web 2.0 (or whatever) age would be to catch the click of a link with onclick, set a cookie, and open the original, intended link. When user would again come back to the site, this cookie would be dumped to the site that so much wanted the information it was clicked. Even if the user would have some sort of embedded resource from this site open somewhere else, it could harvest the information and send it back.

    Instead, we seem to be ending up with endless chains of redirectors and opaque identifiers that are bound to organizations that don't necessarily exist in a year. What a joy to use technology which is driven by needs of utter morons and greed of those interested to press most information out of the morons...

  3. Re:My Idea by clone53421 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Infinite recursion that defeats browser infinite recursion detection:

    http://3.ly/3x5qdno
    http://tinyurl.com/36n5j5y

    (the tinyurl long link is <html><body><script>var t=setTimeout('window.location="http://3.ly/3x5qdno";',50);</script></body></html> encoded in a data: URI)

    --
    Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.