191–200 of 203 posts
psst, don't tell google, but sometimes I like to click the triple dots next to a search result and copy the url in the popup box to the clipboard to get the url without any of the tracking crap. (I mostly do this when google's redirect page lags for some reason)
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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.
Seems to me the old Emac (or vi) saying have changed. Today it is "How do you know someone uses DDG? He'll tell you!"
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Note the caniuse link says "While still in the WHATWG specification, this feature was removed from the W3C HTML5 specification in 2010." Another reason I prefer Firefox. Why implement a rejected non-standard feature whose primary purpose is to enable surveillance?
Seems like it's not meant to enable tracking so much as to improve its performance and UX, as the article demonstrates. (Google tracks clicks from Firefox users just fine without ping, it just does it in a more annoying way.) Also probably worth noting that the W3C doesn't maintain an HTML standard anymore[1]; the WHATWG standard is the definitive one. [1]: https://www.w3.org/html/
they've been doing this for a very long time. didn't know about this ping attribute for anchors though. i always just assumed it was for improving the index. the more a result gets clicked, the more relevant it must be. it's kind of a zero'th order optimization.
Google charges ads per click, possibly mainly for that. Also it's a preferred solution to asynchronously ping the log on click rather than a synchronous redirect hack
the asynchronous ping attribute is new[1]. i'm pretty sure it was the mid-00s when i first noticed that search result links bounced through a redirect via google. (and i'm guessing it was added to reduce confusion when hovering and ameliorate copy/paste issues for search result links, but i don't know for sure)
[1] https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data/pull/9470 (april 2021)
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10 or 15 years ago, I could actually find what I wanted without it second-guessing my queries and rewriting them into irrelevance. Now it's absolutely useless for the hard-to-find information that you most need a search engine for. That's not "objectively better" at all.
I wish you could give us a single example.
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I wish you could give us a single example.
IC part numbers. Service manuals for various equipment (now all you get are sites which may or may not have one, but are willing to collect your $$$). Error codes (filled with pages of results for a different code).
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Firefox has a browser.send_pings setting to control this, not sending any pings when it is set to false. This is explicitly a valid browser implementation of the ping attribute: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/links.html#hyperlink-... > 2. Optionally, return. (For example, the user agent might wish to ignore any or all ping URLs in accordance with the user's expressed preferences.) The problem isn't that Firef…
I noticed this part of the spec too: > When the `ping` attribute is present, user agents should clearly indicate to the user that following the hyperlink will also cause secondary requests to be sent in the background, possibly including listing the actual target URLs. > For example, a visual user agent could include the hostnames of the target ping URLs along with the hyperlink's actual URL in a status bar or toolti…
I see this argument used a lot for including user-hostile features in browsers. I don't think it's a good argument since having a browser implementation a) makes this privacy abuse easier and b) legitimizes the practice. Meanwhile as shown in this post, user-preference to disable the feature is ignored and simply worked around by websites.
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For Firefox, there's a relatively popular extension called ClearURLs that sanitizes most URLs to remove tracking, including Google's and Amazon's.
I did notice a bug with this... I had a magic link for authentication in Gmail that used a `+` symbol in a URL, e.g. ` http://example.com/token/abcd123+3cf== ` and ClearURLs ended up convering the `+` to a `%20` which caused the server to fail to find the token. Otherwise I love ClearURLs.
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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).
I don't want it to be easy to implement.
> and to disable (a user agent can very easily choose whether to respect the ping).
This post is about Google working around that and just falling back to the old redirect-based click tracking for browsers that do not enable pings by default.
So having the attribute increased the browser complexity, brought no value to the user and only helped the tracking industry.
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> 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.