InformAction Forums

Does NoScript perform the functions of the ClearURLs add-on for Firefox?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... clearurls/

If not, are there likely to be any conflicts between NoScript and ClearURLs?

Here is the relevant part of the description of the add-on:

What it does...
This add-on will remove the tracking fields form all URLs which are visited by the browser. We use an external rule file which is regularly updated by us and which you can find here:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Kevin ... /data.json

The reason...
Large (and small) webpages use elements in the URL, e.g.: https://example.com?source=thisIstheSiteIvisitedBefore to track your online activities. In this example, the source field tells the provider which page you visited before. Our add-on will remove these tracking fields from the URL, so you can think of it as an “URL clean maid”.

Why this add-on?
The main differences between this and similar add-ons are they have around 13 rules to remove garbage from urls. Our add-on has around 65 rules to remove garbage fields and much of them are regex-rules, so the rule does not block one field, it blocks all fields with the same structure.

No, this is not a job of NoScript. NoScript is a security tool, not a privacy tool.

Offhand I don't see any obvious reason why you couldn't run both together. I suggest you try it and see how it goes.

(Well NoScript did used to "clean" Google URLs.
Clean Yahoo Search Links)

@therube: That stuff is specific case to get rid of specific redirects on specific pages. The addon mentioned in the OP rewrites request URLs on the fly to remove any tracking from a URL, not necessarily just redirects. NoScript never had such functionality.

Thanks

Well while what NoScript did might be specific, the basic principle is the same.
Sure wish NoScript still did it, even if just for Google!


Guess I'll have to check out ClearURLs.

ClearURLs

I'm pretty sure its working, though oddly the FF "status line" (cough) does show http://www.google.com/... - when you click a link?

(Without the extension, some sort of "subdocument" does something [in Developer Tools], that does not happen when using the extension & clicking on a google search page link, https://www.google.com/search?q=ncmain.exe&.)

barbaz wrote:No, this is not a job of NoScript. NoScript is a security tool, not a privacy tool.

barbaz wrote:The addon mentioned in the OP rewrites request URLs on the fly to remove any tracking from a URL, not necessarily just redirects. NoScript never had such functionality.

I'm confused by this, because NoScript definitely "cleans" Google links for me. With it disabled, hovering over them displays all the tracking garbage, and clicking on them results in opening the links with all of it in them. If I enable NoScript, the links reflect just the site URL, without any of the extra crap. So maybe it was designed to be a security tool and not a privacy one, but it seems to me it's providing this privacy feature, even if unintentionally. Furthermore, this is despite having scripts allowed globally, and digging through the settings multiple times, enabling and disabling various ones, doesn't make a difference, so it would seem this "feature" is embedded in the core functionality of NoScript.

And as if that wasn't curious enough, I've found ClearURLs and Neat URL to do absolutely nothing with google search results. Only Don't Track me Google does. But unless I'm missing something, none of these are needed for google searches, since NoScript definitely does the job, making ClearURLs the only one that might be useful, but even then only if it covers some cases where NoScript doesn't, and so far I don't have much faith at all in it, considering its failure to work on google searches and the fact that 99% of the logs are either where it removed a single & from the end of a URL and left all the rest or where it says the URL is blocked.

vertigo wrote:I'm confused by this,

That's because you only partially quoted my second post.

NoScript is not a URL cleaner in general. Like I said, cleaning Google search results is a special case. And NoScript's method of cleaning Google search result links is totally different from how ClearURLs cleans links. ClearURLs removes tracking from URLs on the fly, while NoScript modifies the links 'beforehand'.

Does this help clarify?

Thanks! That makes perfect sense. I actually left out that part when quoting because I didn't think it was applicable, as I thought you were referencing ClearURLs as being a special case. I actually was only going to quote the "NoScript never had such functionality" part, but wanted to give it context, because I thought you were saying it never had the functionality to clean links. I understand it now as you were saying it never had the functionality to rewrite them, but what it actually does is removes their ability to change themselves upon click. So it seems then that between ClearURLs vs Neat URL vs Don't track me Google, even though the latter is the only one that kept the links from changing, since it only works on Google, which NoScript handles already, it's redundant, and ClearURLs may or may not be useful elsewhere (in my limited testing, I think I've found one case where it actually did something), so it probably wouldn't hurt to run it alongside NoScript. Thanks again for the clarification.

You're welcome

@vertigo,

but wanted to give it context

And in that context, you are using NoScript 5.x with FF 56?
And NoScript 5.x (& 2.x) do "clean" Google links.
But the last I looked, NoScript 10.x (& FF Quantum) does not.