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Chrome 64 Now Trims Messy Links When You Share Them (theverge.com)
Google's latest consumer version of Chrome, version number 64, just started cleaning up messy referral links for you. From a report: Now, when you go to share an item, you'll no longer see a long tracking string after a link, just the primary link itself. This feature now happens automatically when sharing links in Chrome, either by the Share menu or by copying the link and pasting it elsewhere. Even though it slices off the extra bit of the URL, this doesn't affect referral information. If you choose, you can copy and paste directly from the URL bar to grab the link in entirety.
I usually manually trim everything after the ? in the link, but now I won't have to
As an experiment I tried copying a URL from Google Ads.
Guess what?
I got the full, mangled URL, not the clean version that they do for their competitors.
Thanks Google. You truly have your user's interests at heart.
I'm pretty sure the market will adapt to whatever Chrome does, ensuring that things don't break.
Are we saying that there's no longer a way to get the full URL to the clipboard? That would be intensely annoying in many situations. Is this a feature on mobile only?
And how do they know what they can safely trim? It they only do this for sites they understand then this should mostly work well but you can bet on annoying issues elsewhere. I guess understanding some of the common platforms like WordPress, Drupal, etc. could help but there are so many versions of those with constant updates that it's bound to trip up sometimes.
So this feature will mostly work and provide some convenience for the masses but the price is going to be confusion and annoyance for those who know their way around a URL, plus random breakage.
Maybe this is a sign that websites are using URLs in the wrong way. Can't they just move all that stuff Google is trying to hide into cookies and/or form fields instead so the URLs are kept vaguely human readable and not crazily long?
Maybe I just haven't read far enough in the replies, but it seems like everyone so far is missing the point and reaching for other reasons/defects/etc. AFAICT, the motivation and everything else is very simple...
When one shares a link that includes tracking information, and someone else uses that link, it weakens the value of the tracked info/user, because it's no longer tracking one user. The further that link spreads, the more diluted and useless that tracking identifier becomes. If they can strip it before it gets spread around, they can maintain more accurate data.
This isn't a them just cleaning up their own mess. This isn't them helping to keep your shared URL's shorter or cleaner. This isn't to help protect anyone from leaking tracking ids. This doesn't cut down on the amount of tracking done to users. It just improves the tracking they're already doing, all while (effectively) hiding that from you a little bit so you're less likely to be bothered by it.
To reinforce that theory, just look at the links they create in hangouts and gmail. Here's what "https://slashdot.org/" looks like when you "copy link address" and paste it: ... they're not trying to shorten jack shit. There's no real benefit to the user.
https://www.google.com/url?q=h...
Back to the share link thing, IMO, there should at least be a config item to set which keys get trimmed per-site, and maybe allow that to be configured by the site via a META tag.
I expect this is just step one. Once Chrome users are used to this, then Google will introduce step 2. That may be Google rewriting the links to channel everything through AMP, or it may be something less blatant but more insidious.
It's just another reason not to use IE6... er, I mean, Google Chrome. They're just going to keep taking further and further advantage of their dominant market position to go into full-MS mode. Twenty years from now, people will be amazed that anyone saw Google as anything but the second coming of Y2K Microsoft.
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