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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
I have no problem with this feature under a "share" button, but plain-old copy and paste are not a tag-team synonym for sharing in any sane world.
The PC revolution was largely built on determinism at scale: the same operation repeated (on your machine, or the next machine) achieves the same results. This was pretty new in the world in the late seventies. It's why we became able to build more complex distributed systems than ever before; it's how we ultimately carved our way out of spaghetti-code mountain.
Now we take this boon for granted, and the pendulum continues to swing back toward infantilization.
Now copy, too, is apparently on its way to sloppy seconds (the way of all things shared too much, howsoever assiduously groomed).
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.
From TFA: It also recently introduced automatic blocks for bad and unwanted ads...
In other words, it blocks ads that don't contribute to the Google revenue stream. That's what they mean by Bad Ads.
Aren't a good percentage of the GET parameters floating around out there Google Analytics parameters (i.e. utm_campaign1, utm_a, etc.)? Aren't they just cleaning up their own company's mess?
They should probably make this an optional feature that can be disabled.
BTW - I think this proves that they're tracking everything people do in Chrome. How else could they roll out such a computer paradigm-breaking feature with such confidence (on by default)?
https://stackoverflow.com/ques...
There's loads of javascipt that already changes copied text, prepending or appending anything you want. And also copying to the clipboard, usually just to share a link, onclick it automatically writes to the clipboard. This library handles writing to the clipboard for you if you need such a thing https://clipboardjs.com/
From the linked article:
"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."
From the actual article, that Verge sponged from:
"The URL streamlining happens automatically when you use the Share menu in Chrome (but not Chrome Custom Tabs). You can copy to the clipboard or share directly to another app—no setup required. If you highlight the URL bar and select text manually, you can still get the full URL with all the junk at the end."
Whoever paraphrased that for Verge doesn't understand how to read.
FC Closer
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.