Rather's Link Shortener

A link shortener that actually shortens links — strips tracking junk from URLs in place. For clean shareable links.

Not replacing a link with a short link that could go anywhere. No redirect service, no link wrapper, nothing that hides where a link goes. Your link stays your link, same page and same site, just without the hundreds of characters of tracking IDs, session tokens, and search breadcrumbs stuffed onto the end. The address-bar URL is rewritten in place, so the link you copy to share is the clean canonical form. The sites it covers add up to more than a quarter of all visits on the web: over a hundred billion page visits every month, including twelve of the world's twenty most-visited sites. If someone sent you a long, junk-covered link today, odds are it came from a page this extension cleans. WHAT GETS CLEANED More than two hundred popular sites are supported, spanning shopping, travel booking, social media, entertainment, search, cloud documents, and a news pack covering more than fifty outlets across every world region. Each has hand-tuned rules for that site's URL structure. The full list is visible in the extension's popup and on the project page. The cleanup is careful about what it keeps. Parameters that change what the recipient actually sees survive: product variant selections stay locked, playlist position is kept, comment deep-links still scroll to the right comment, video timestamps survive, and paywall gift links keep working. Only the tracking clutter goes. HOW IT WORKS Land on a supported page and the address-bar URL is rewritten to its canonical short form in place, with no reload and no flicker. On the largest supported shopping site, in-page product links are rewritten too, so right-clicking and choosing Copy link address also gives the clean form. Right-click any link (or any page) and choose "Copy clean URL" to clean it on the spot. This works on every site, because the universal tracking-parameter stripper kicks in as a fallback. It also sees through tracking redirectors: links wrapped by corporate email protection, search-result click-trackers, social outbound wrappers, and AMP viewer pages all copy as their REAL destination, recovered from the link itself, never by making a network request. And when you CLICK a wrapped link, an option (on by default, toggleable in the popup) skips the tracker page entirely and takes you straight to the real destination; corporate email-protection links are deliberately left alone so workplace scanning keeps working. It works on selected text too (even URLs that aren't clickable links), the toolbar popup shows the current page's cleaned link with a one-click copy button, a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+L by default) does the same without opening anything, and typing "clean" in the address bar followed by a pasted URL jumps straight to its clean form. The popup goes further than a copy button: it shows exactly WHAT was removed from the current page's URL as strikethrough chips, offers the original URL back if you want it, copies in rich formats (Markdown, an HTML link, title + URL), reports a bad cleanup straight to the project's issue tracker, and renders a QR code of the clean link for sending to a phone, generated entirely offline. A bulk cleaner page takes any pasted text (a whole email or document) and cleans every link inside it at once. And a local stats counter tracks how many URLs and characters of junk you've been spared; it lives only on your device, is never synced, and is never sent anywhere (there is nothing in this extension that CAN send it anywhere). The interface speaks ten languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Turkish, Russian, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese. On hotel and rental listing pages, a small floating widget offers one-click copy buttons: the bare listing URL, or the listing with your selected dates included. It hides itself automatically on small screens. CONTROLS A master toggle turns everything off instantly, with a visible OFF badge. Every site has its own toggle, organized into collapsible regional groups with a filter box to find any site instantly; groups remember how you left them. An opt-in "Universal tracking strip" (off by default) extends cleanup to every site you visit. The browser asks you to grant the wider permission when you enable it, and turning the toggle off hands that permission straight back (the extension holds it only while the feature is on). An Advanced settings page holds the less-used preferences (travel widget, Amazon item-name slugs), lets you skip chosen domains or always keep chosen parameters, shows your local stats with a reset button, and can export every setting to a JSON file (and import it back). All preferences sync across your browser installs. ZERO DATA COLLECTION No analytics, no telemetry, no network requests of any kind. The only thing stored is your toggle settings. Nothing ever leaves your browser. OPEN SOURCE Plain, dependency-free JavaScript with over 32,000 automated checks: https://github.com/Tommytwolegs/link-shortener