ClearURLstekijä Kevin R.

Changelog can be found here

What it does...
This add-on will remove the tracking fields from all URLs, which are visited by the browser, with the help of an external rule file, which is regularly updated by us and can be found here, to protect your privacy.

The reason...
Large (and small) websites use elements in the URL, e.g.: https://example.com?utm_source=newsletter1&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=sale to track your online activities. In this example, the utm fields used to track a custom campaign, managed by Google. It tells the provider, and also Google, the source, the medium (e.g. email or web) and the specific campaign of the link. All these tracking fields are not necessary for a website to be displayed or work correctly and can therefore be removed - that is exactly what ClearURLs does, so you can think of it as an "URL clean maid".

Another common example are Amazon URLs. If you search for a product on Amazon you will get a very long URL for this product, e.g. https://www.amazon.com/dp/exampleProduct/ref=sxin_0_pb?__mk_de_DE=ÅMÅŽÕÑ&keywords=tea&pd_rd_i=exampleProduct&pd_rd_r=8d39e4cd-1e4f-43db-b6e7-72e969a84aa5&pd_rd_w=1pcKM&pd_rd_wg=hYrNl&pf_rd_p=50bbfd25-5ef7-41a2-68d6-74d854b30e30&pf_rd_r=0GMWD0YYKA7XFGX55ADP&qid=1517757263&rnid=2914120011,
the most of this URL is available for tracking and is not needed. After ClearURLs has cleaned this URL, it looks like this:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/exampleProduct


Why this add-on?
The main differences between this and similar add-ons are they have around 13 rules to remove garbage from urls. Our add-on has around 130 rules to remove garbage fields and much of them are regex-rules, so the rule does not block one field, it blocks all fields with the same structure. The addon also redirect google search results and reddit links. Our redirection rule base grows fast and we will offer much more in future to protect your privacy.
And ClearURLs is open source, so everyone can join in to the project and/or can check the source code to error or malicious code.

A recommended extension...
ClearURLs is now a recommended extension in the ghacks-user.js project (https://github.com/ghacksuserjs/ghacks-user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions) and we are proud of it. ClearURLs is also on the Awesome Humane Tech List (https://github.com/humanetech-community/awesome-humane-tech#tracking).


What do we collect?
This add-on protects your privacy and we also respect it. We do not and will never collect any of your usage data.


What do I do if I have trouble?
Visit our GitLab page or check out our wiki.


Write us...
If have any suggestions or complaints, please write a us on GitLab: https://gitlab.com/KevinRoebert/ClearUrls/issues

Permissions
Reasoning for needed permissions you can find under this discussion.

Contributors

• Kevin Röbert (creator/developer)
• Yi-Ping Huang (translator)
• rayman89 (translator)
• Ramon Santilli (translator)
• Lucifer (translator)
• Shitennouji (translator)
• K3A (contributor)
• perdolka (contributor)
• Nameless (contributor)
• a-polivanchuk (translator)
• hydrargyrum (translator)
• alekksander (translator)
• Zoltan Toldy (translator)
• tartpvule (contributor)
• Giovanni (translator)

Supported languages
English, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), German, French, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Ukrainian, Italian