Speaking of Google web products not working with Firefox: Google Meet backgrounds. What's most frustrating there is that it used to work until they disabled it to just throw up an ad for Chrome (i.e. use a "supported" browser).
Prevent Google from mangling search result links when click/copying on Firefox
141–150 of 203 posts
Re: Prevent Google from mangling search result links when click/copying on Firefox
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't it "!g" or do both work?
Both work! Which is really nice on a mobile keyboard since it will do an auto space after the !.
(If you have one that can be and is configured to do so. I don't, because I find that annoying whether I'm writing a DDG query or not! My computer doesn't do that, it's jarring if my 'phone does.)
Re: Prevent Google from mangling search result links when click/copying on Firefox
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually prefer short userscripts like this over addons, because I can immediately see it's not doing anything nefarious and I only need to trust the addon that I install the user script with.
> I only need to trust the addon that I install the user script with I wonder why this is even necessary. User scripting should be a standard feature of browsers. We should have direct access to a complete Javascript environment every time we launch a browser. Just like Emacs gives users a Lisp environment.
It is, sort of, in Firefox. It's just janky and unfriendly and underdocumented.
But you can have user styles, user chrome (styling of the FF frame itself), and user scripts per profile, as files wherever all your profile stuff is stored, e.g. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/mozilla/firefox/profiles/blah.
Re: Prevent Google from mangling search result links when click/copying on Firefox
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
> whose primary purpose is to enable surveillance Google search is good because it tracks what links people click and knows when they come back to go to a different url on the page. if 99% of people visit the top result for a query, return, then hit the second one, chances are that the top result never answers what the search query asks.
People here may not like to read "Google" and "good" together, but yours is a description of how things actually work. Of all the tracking Google does, this is by far the most justified, and least concerning to me. I'd rather log out and search anonymously, if my concern was being put in a bubble, rather than block this kind of feedback for search result quality. Then, again, I primarily use DuckDuckGo and I wonder i…
Yes, ddg sends out beacons to improving.duckduckgo.com when you click as well to do this.
https://i.judge.sh/ragged/Derpy/chrome_5j8fWLGX6J.png
They have an info page on it: https://improivng.duckduckgo.com.
Re: Prevent Google from mangling search result links when click/copying on Firefox
#145Google does this so they have click tracking data. But they don't need to mangle URLs in Chrome because it supports the `ping` attribute on tags [0]. The ping attribute basically adds click tracking as a native browser feature so you don't need to do URL redirects. It also makes these analytics much easier for the site and mysterious to the user. Looks like most vendors besides Firefox support it. (They were pretty o…
I see no cases when I, as a user, would want my broswer to support "ping" attribute. It's basically shady as fuck.
If everybody was using "ping" instead of their various other tracking solutions (Javascript, redirecting) then you could just disable it in browser settings.
Re: Prevent Google from mangling search result links when click/copying on Firefox
#146Google does this so they have click tracking data. But they don't need to mangle URLs in Chrome because it supports the `ping` attribute on tags [0]. The ping attribute basically adds click tracking as a native browser feature so you don't need to do URL redirects. It also makes these analytics much easier for the site and mysterious to the user. Looks like most vendors besides Firefox support it. (They were pretty o…
I see no cases when I, as a user, would want my broswer to support "ping" attribute. It's basically shady as fuck.
Because then you could at least see the URL you're going to instead of the redirect the site is going to use to track you anyway.
This attribute doesn't do anything shady, and would do the opposite if it were actually used. The whole idea is to be able to provide the tracking data the site will get one way or the other, but with the ping attribute, you can do it without mangling the URLs.
Re: Prevent Google from mangling search result links when click/copying on Firefox
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. That's why I solved this problem by using DDG. Although I admit some searches I have to send to Google to get the result I'm looking for.
Same for me, but all google searches are done by DDG bangs like 'g!'
Using bangs defeats the purpose of using DDG in the first place.
And DDG tracks your clicks just like Google does.
Re: Prevent Google from mangling search result links when click/copying on Firefox
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
> whose primary purpose is to enable surveillance Google search is good because it tracks what links people click and knows when they come back to go to a different url on the page. if 99% of people visit the top result for a query, return, then hit the second one, chances are that the top result never answers what the search query asks.
> Google search is good because Google search might have been good over a decade ago but today it's trash.
Google is objectively a better search engine then it was 10 or 15 years ago.
Re: Prevent Google from mangling search result links when click/copying on Firefox
#149Google does this so they have click tracking data. But they don't need to mangle URLs in Chrome because it supports the `ping` attribute on tags [0]. The ping attribute basically adds click tracking as a native browser feature so you don't need to do URL redirects. It also makes these analytics much easier for the site and mysterious to the user. Looks like most vendors besides Firefox support it. (They were pretty o…
Why can't they just add a click-listener to the links?
Re: Prevent Google from mangling search result links when click/copying on Firefox
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see no cases when I, as a user, would want my broswer to support "ping" attribute. It's basically shady as fuck.
If everybody was using "ping" instead of their various other tracking solutions (Javascript, redirecting) then you could just disable it in browser settings.
That's the whole point: to give link tracking a simple consistent interface, which makes it much easier to implement (no JavaScript libraries or proxy URLs) and to disable (a user agent can very easily choose whether to respect the ping).