It's a shame because it is actually a good idea, but now Google has first-mover advantage, so any other implementations will just be a clone of what Google already did.

http://archive.is/ got there first, sort of. If you archive a page then highlight some text, the URL changes to a direct shareable link to that text.

Bonus: being its own site, and implemented in javascript, it's already cross-browser.

Isn't that...better than every browser having an incompatible implementation of it, so Firefox users could only share links with Firefox users, etc?

I get the argument that it's better for these things to be done by consensus among the browser makers. Is it in scope for WHATWG?

> Or, we could just go with occam's razor and believe that a bunch of bored engineers at google decided to simply add a feature completely disconnected from any of their business plans

I understand the skepticism about Google's motivations but "making Chrome better and more feature rich so people will want to use it" is completely in line with Google's business plans.

I believe you. That's what the fine folks at the IE team did with ajax too, for example. And I am not being ironic, but the line is so thin that I have to point it out either way.

> what people click on email, thanks to gmail rewriting all links to a google track url (while misleading the user by a fake status text on mouse over)

They use the same trick for Google Search in a way that is transparent to the user - as long as you have JS turned on. When you switch it off, you realize instead of clicking on HNs URL, you actually click https://www.google.com/url?q=https://news.ycombinator.com/&s...

Now, they want to move a step further. I wonder when they're going to stop.

Actually, it seems like the <a> you click on Google Search has the right href (which is what appears on the status text) but it also has a ping attribute to it for tracking.

https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_a_ping.asp

I'm surprised there is not a chrome extension to remove these.

I'm not surprised at all. Fortunately we still have Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-no-tra...

Edit: it seems to remove ping, but the onmousedown event is still there.

Nobody cares, really, except for a percent fringe users of a percent of Google users.

On a more general point, once again Google Search is provided to you for free. If you don't want to use it by their rules, you are entirely free to use Bing or Yahoo. Actually using the service regularly, because it is tailored to your workflow and provides value to you, while complaining that the tailored/value-adding part is driven by an analysis of your behaviour on the servicee... that's very hypocritical.

I don't use Google, I use StartPage. I am plainly stating that I am surprised nobody made an extension to remove the ping= link attribute from all webpages, considering that the only reason it exists is to track user activity.

That is exactly what is hypocritical about your behaviour: Startpage exclusively uses results from Google, which the company pays Google for. So you are using Google regularly while complaining about it.

check out one called NoRedirect on both chrome and firefox.

This technique (redirecting through some dummy ?url=... page) is a common way of doing an external redirect on any service you're building. It's a simple way of making it impossible to see the actual Referer to external website, which is more secure to your data and the service you're building (e.g. Gmail).

There's a standard way to do that, which is to add a rel="noreferrer" tag to your outgoing links.

Code usually doesn't carry final HTML in its data structures, whereas converting a URL in a single place where it's extracted is easy. In other words, making sure you didn't miss to put rel=noreferrer everywhere is way harder.

And it still makes somewhat sense to not entirely rely on it, given people still use browsers that do not support it.

> It's a simple way of making it impossible to see the actual Referer to external website

It's about tracking outbound links, not about masking the referrer. As already mentioned, there are standard ways for that.

Tracking can be done in JS via onclick event also. What makes you so sure it's not about masking referrer?

Because I've done tracking like that for several years, lots of services are still doing it this way and because rel="noopener" or rel="noreferrer" is the way to go if you want to mask the referrer. Even Google recommends to do it that way[0].

If you are not using it for tracking, there is no point in doing it like this after all.

[0] https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/audits/no...

But browsers seem to have stopped giving out referrer some years back.