November 22, 2024

Often when copying and pasting links, you would find a lot of unnecessary elements at the end of links. These are the long tracking codes embedded within the links to measure your link interactions like from where you have clicked on the link (social media, websites, and so on) and more.

ClearURLs is a Firefox add-on that cleans such links so that the link only contains what is necessary to open them and not other elements. 

Example: A link from an online shopping website looks like this:

unclean link with tracking elements in it

After cleaning it up using ClearURLs, it would look like this:

clean link with tracking elements removed from it using ClearURLs

The link would still be accessible and functional but without the extra tracking elements.

Download and install the ClearURLs add-on from the Firefox add-ons page.

ClearURLs Firefox add-on page

Click on Add to complete the installation.

Add ClearURLs add-on to Firefox

Once installed, it will automatically be available when you right-click on a link. To clean up a link, click the Copy Clean Link Location option.

copy a link to be cleaned using ClearURLs

Paste it to get the clean link without the tracking elements. 

You can also check if ClearURLs is processing such links by clicking the extensions icon and then clicking the ClearURLs icon.

ClearURLs add-on icon in Firefox

It will show you the elements blocked in different links and other statistics.

link processing statistics in ClearURLs

ClearURLs cleaning tool:

Another cool feature that ClearURLs comes with is the batch link cleaning option (ClearURLs cleaning tool). To use it, click the add-on icon and go to the tools symbol.

accessing the link cleaning tool

It will open a page that lets you paste multiple links to be cleaned.

ClearURLs cleaning tool

Click on the Clean URLs button to get the clean versions that won’t have any tracking elements in them.

To configure other settings, click on the ClearURLs icon and then on the gear icon.

ClearURLs settings icon

The default settings are fine but you can choose to customize them if needed.

ClearURLs settings page

This is a useful URL management add-on for Firefox that lets you clean up links and browse them.

By the way, if you want to select and open multiple links in one go, then Snap Links Plus is a useful Firefox add-on to do so. 

Happy browsing.

By admin

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