Introducing a New Option in Firefox to Avoid Trackers – Have You Heard?

A new measure to increase your privacy on the net appears in Firefox. On the occasion of the release of version 120 of the web browser, on November 21, 2023, an additional option to copy links was deployed. This offers Internet users the possibility of taking a URL stripped of all the superfluous.

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Clean up links in Firefox

It is in fact a matter of “cleaning” all the elements which are used to track the Internet user: where he came from, through which channel he arrived, what could he have clicked on, etc. Some of this information is transmitted via the link. With this new option, all these codes called UTM (for Urchin Tracking Module), which are used for example for marketing tracking, jump.

A demonstration with a link from Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox.

Without using the new Firefox 120 option, a copied URL could look like this:

Here, everything after the question mark “?” » in the URL is not required to reach the intended web page. These are parameters that do not serve the Internet user, but the website, in order to better understand the behavior of Internet users. These are options which are not necessarily illegitimate, to capture information about this or that visitor.

In this case, the information indicates that the Firefox browser was used, and that this is the desktop version. The last element is used to say that we obtained this link via the “About” window of the software. This provides information such as the program version, privacy policy, user rights, etc.

With the new option in Firefox 120, the URL would appear like this:

Internet users are free to determine when to use this copy without all these indications. Access to this copy without tracking is very simple. Once Firefox is updated, right-click on a hyperlink you want to follow. This will bring up a context menu with the option “Copy link without site tracking”.

Please note, if you click on the link directly with the left click, nothing will happen: you will display the requested page without having carried out the cleaning. The main difficulty for the Internet user will therefore be to be aware of the tool and to think about using it each time he presses or sees tracking parameters in the URL.

It is possible to see if a link in a text contains this kind of code, simply by hovering over it with the mouse cursor. In this case, a small window appears at the bottom left of the screen with the full URL. This gives you an idea of ​​the hyperlink that has been slipped into the page. It remains to be seen if Mozilla will one day dare to make this mechanism the default… directly on the left click.