Google Redirects Fixer & Tracking Remover — matagus

New version fixing issue when opening links in a new tab is being reviewed by Mozilla. In the meantime, if you want to test it, download it here.

Please carefully read "How it works section" before making your review or opening an issue!

Brief description

Google uses a redirection link to tracks your clicks, in order to analyze the stats and later optimize their search results. This addon simply removes that redirection and turns every search result in its original link, saving your time and giving you more security.

Works on results accessed from http://google.com or https://google.com (and any country variation like google.es, google.co.uk and so on) and from the Firefox search box, works on regular results and Google Blogs, Google News, Google Recipes, Google Images, Google Videos, Google Alerts and even using encrypted.google.com.

It also cleans up all the links you copy & paste from google search results pages. This is one is a feature most users are looking for and other similar addons don't have.

How it works (and why it works that way)

When I first developed this addon, it worked by changing every single link in every google search result page you load. This is quite expensive (for the browser) and in some cases (like Google Image Search when you scroll down several times and that loads a lot of images) the browser performance get downgraded.

So the addon does not modifies every google search results links in a page anymore: it waits till you click one of them (left, right or middle button click) or till you open a new tab and paste an url in the url bar: then the addon intercepts the network request (if it is a google redirect) and fixes it and does the request to the final url.

It's a little complex and not intuitive, but I've found that this is the way to go. Other addons fail when you paste a google result link with a redirect because they only work when you click on it or when you copy it.

I hope it helps you understand the way the addon works.

Feedback

Please give me feedback as much as you can and suggest features. I'll be maintaining and supporting this addon since it proved to be usefull for the community. I'll be glad to hear from you. Just post your idea/bug/issue using the support site.

Features coming soon:

• Toolbar button to turn on and off this addon features
• Customizable shortcurt to do the same