Firefox

Or a setting that makes it the default.

I don't like any software I use to destroy data (even tracking data) without my say so.

Or at least the option to make it the default. I could see some situations where someone may want to test a link with non-identifying parameters (like identifying the campaign source), and not wanting to have that stripped from the URL by default.

But I get you, from a consumer perspective I'd also want it as my default.

In the meantime, there's ClearURLs or uBlock Origin with filter lists.

Doesn’t it just clean up the link or does Firefox actually know which part of the link to remove?

It’s not the default because it can break links sometimes, like links that have authentication details in the parameters.

There's an addon I use for the Android version that does this by default.

It does miss some queryparams though but it dramatically reduces the URL size for the big offending sites.

But default is putting your cursor in the address bar and hitting ctrl-c. How would Firefox clean it like that?

At my school, firefox on the computers are not updated at all so it's using the very old firefox. Even then, it's not that slow. Now the current update is way more modern but it does have the weird stuff like pocket and very weird advertisements bookmarked on the front page. You'll get a much better experience after you do all the adjustments of removing everything and installing the proper extensions, maybe a little arkenfox too.

Not sure what th is, but ref is the referrer's ID, which gives the referrer a referral / affiliate bonus if you purchase the item using that link. In theory it's not a bad way to support the referrer and it's not linked to you as an individual personally. You can remove it of course if you feel like they don't deserve the money for referring you to a deal. In the end ref or no ref the price of the item remains the same for you.

I think firefox leaves the ref in intentionally.

The "ref" param is clearly a tracking breadcrumb, but not sure what the "th" param is. So this is "better" than nothing, but still has room for improvement. "_encoding" is fine, but UTF-8 should be a default for most users anyways.

Can't wait til the entire extension ecosystem is available on mobile

Or uBlock Origin with filter lists. 👍

Well yeah but building in privacy-enhancing features like this is a great strategy for FF.

My c++ is pretty rusty, but I hopped through the changelogs. I think this is the source for it here https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/toolkit/components/antitracking/URLQueryStringStripper.cpp

I don't know the relevant programming languages so I don't know what to search for, but generally, if you want to find something in the Firefox source code, supposedly https://searchfox.org is a great way to do that.

It won't

it just removes all the crap at the end of a link

Generally a link tells a browser where to find something on the Web, but you can stuff it with additional information so that when a server receives a request for that something, it will know how the browser got that link.

This feature strip's out that additional information.

Try to copy an Amazon link with and without this option and you'll see

As of this writing, it doesn't look like it.

As @SatyrSack@lemmy.one here mentioned, URLChecker is a good way to manipulate a URL before opening it.