Review by cheatfreak47
Rated 3 out of 5
by cheatfreak47, 2 years agoClearURLs is an extension I've used for about a year, but I've recently disabled for the time being.
On the surface, ClearURLs is an excellent extension and it provides all the things it claims to, and it works, exactly as described.
The problem really comes from when it doesn't work- and how annoying it is to deal with in those situations.
ClearURLs lacks what I would call an extremely essential feature for an extension like this. A Whitelist. When ClearURLs breaks something, your only option(s) are to report it to the developer, and disable it until you are past whatever thing it broke, and then turn it back on.
This is tremendously annoying. To make matters worse, from what I can tell- the development of this extension has been relatively stale in the last few years. I'm sure the developer has plenty of good reasons why they haven't been working on it too much, but that doesn't change the reality of the situation.
Whitelisting has been an issue on their issue tracker for over 4 years. There's been an open merge request that added the feature for at least a year which hasn't been merged, and in that time, there's only been a handful of commits, usually just what I consider "maintenance mode" sorts of pushes. Stuff like "oh firefox changed a thing, I'll just remove this little bit here then" stuff.
On top of that, it's clear that the issue tracker is full of reports, many of which are clear duplicates and it really isn't being maintained all that well. Obviously developing extensions takes time and effort, like any software so I won't really hold that against them, but still- it seems a little scatterbrained to me.
Regardless, ClearURLs is fine for what it is, I just think a few small feature upgrades would take it from being just pretty good sometimes to truly being excellent, and arguably an essential online privacy extension. It just currently annoys me too much to use it regularly.
On the surface, ClearURLs is an excellent extension and it provides all the things it claims to, and it works, exactly as described.
The problem really comes from when it doesn't work- and how annoying it is to deal with in those situations.
ClearURLs lacks what I would call an extremely essential feature for an extension like this. A Whitelist. When ClearURLs breaks something, your only option(s) are to report it to the developer, and disable it until you are past whatever thing it broke, and then turn it back on.
This is tremendously annoying. To make matters worse, from what I can tell- the development of this extension has been relatively stale in the last few years. I'm sure the developer has plenty of good reasons why they haven't been working on it too much, but that doesn't change the reality of the situation.
Whitelisting has been an issue on their issue tracker for over 4 years. There's been an open merge request that added the feature for at least a year which hasn't been merged, and in that time, there's only been a handful of commits, usually just what I consider "maintenance mode" sorts of pushes. Stuff like "oh firefox changed a thing, I'll just remove this little bit here then" stuff.
On top of that, it's clear that the issue tracker is full of reports, many of which are clear duplicates and it really isn't being maintained all that well. Obviously developing extensions takes time and effort, like any software so I won't really hold that against them, but still- it seems a little scatterbrained to me.
Regardless, ClearURLs is fine for what it is, I just think a few small feature upgrades would take it from being just pretty good sometimes to truly being excellent, and arguably an essential online privacy extension. It just currently annoys me too much to use it regularly.
1,008 reviews
- Rated 4 out of 5by EdTheShed, 4 days agoI really like this extension, but unfortunately it prevents the Google AI Overview from working on Google searches. An ability to except certain websites would be highly appreciated! :)
- Rated 3 out of 5by cj, 5 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Spiderman, 8 days ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 15070452, 13 days ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by KT, 17 days agoplease please please make it possible to allow exceptions! google play books won't work when the extension is enabled which is really inconvenient for me
- Rated 5 out of 5by firuz, 25 days agoGreat job devs! Very usefull extension, I would like a request url cleaner on extension view on my panel instead of separate page, it will be very great and ease to use. Thanks!
- Rated 5 out of 5by Błażej, 25 days agoI don't like being spied on so that addon really helps me with my life.
- Rated 2 out of 5by Firefox user 19173280, a month ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 19145735, a month ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by LastStar007, a month agoSometimes breaks legitimate websites and there's no way to add an exception.
- Rated 5 out of 5by frostbyte, a month ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by cin, a month ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 18828191, a month ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 13443993, a month ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by Firefox user 15758195, a month agoSo far, it seems to work well. However, it currently doesn't work with Reddit.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Tahkarof, a month ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Quitanell, 2 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Hiro, 2 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Jade, 2 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 19072892, 2 months ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by Terravine, 2 months agoSeems alright overall, but stopped working with bing, and blocked the ability to receive Microsoft rewards. Had to uninstall. Would be nice if there was a whitelist.
- Rated 4 out of 5by david benderradji, 2 months ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Norbert, 2 months agoWarning: Breaks public service login systems
This extension removes critical parameters from URLs used in SAML logins (like RelayState, SAMLRequest), which breaks authentication flows on government websites such as Spain’s SEPE / Cl@ve.
The lack of a domain whitelist makes it too aggressive for practical daily use. Great idea — but the execution is becoming detached from real-world needs.