Chrome 64 now trims messy links when you share them

This seems like an odd feature, with more downsides than positives. Sure: long, messy URLs seem ugly; but, anchor tags and query parameters are often integral to display the desired state of a certain page. Anchor tags especially.<p>Also, how does it determine which parameters are critical to keep in? In the example, `ie` and `node` are retained, but `smid` is stripped. Obviously, `node` is important`, but `smid` may also be, whereas `ie` seems superfluous.

I like the idea of sharing clean URL&#x27;s. Actually, I use the Pure URL add-on[0] for Firefox which also removes garbage such as e-mail campaign tracking values, both for the purpose of sharing and since I prefer seeing&#x2F;visiting clean URL&#x27;s myself as well.<p>The Chrome implementation using the canonical URL has some edge cases which may be useful to handle, like adding the fragment which isn&#x27;t part of the canonical URL for the resource yet can be useful to share. Given that this change is only for the share dialog and not for copying from the URL bar, that doesn&#x27;t seem like a huge problem though.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;pure-url&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;pure-url&#x2F;</a>

Almost right! Imagine if Chrome also trimmed away all the AMP mess when sharing a link.

Great for Google because they limit tracking for the sites it trims the links for. But Google can still see where it came from. Equals more profits.

Does this work for links from a Google search result too?

It appears to rewrite a URL of the form <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;browse&#x2F;..." rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;browse&#x2F;...</a>. to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;b?..." rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;b?...</a>. . This means it either has a (possibly huge) database of rewrite rules that needs to be kept up-to-date, or communicates with yet another Google API. Probably the latter, leaking even more of your browsing history to Google.