We've all seen something fascinating online and can't wait to share it with our friends. Things are a lot easier with the "Share" button plastered pretty much everywhere. But when that's lacking, the only alternative is to share a direct URL. Very often, you will often encounter URLs that have a wall of text attached to them. Nobody wants all that junk included when you share a link, as it makes the link unnecessarily long and the recipient often thinks twice before clicking it. Third-party solutions such as TinyURL offer some respite, but a large number of users are not aware of its existence.
Chrome recently started taking care of unnecessarily long URLs. As of v64, the browser trims off unnecessary strings at the end of URLs. The best part is, the process happens automatically when you use the Share menu in Chrome. You can copy to the clipboard or share directly to another app.
However, if you have to share a URL with, let's say, an affiliate link. Chrome's URL trimming will remove any anchor tags and affiliate information. So you might get directed to the top of the page instead of the section that you were linked to. It's a minor inconvenience and can be easily overcome by simply pasting the entire URL address from the Omnibar.
A similar feature has been observed in AMP pages so that sharing the content would generate a usable URL. The feature doesn't work in Chrome v63 or earlier, but it's available in v64, which is still in beta. Other than third-party URL shorteners, the only solution at the moment is to manually purge the URL of all the unnecessary bits or rely on browser extensions that do it for now.
It appears that Google is finally implementing features that people actually want into Chrome. The URL cleaner joins the ranks of the inbuilt ad-blocker and a host of other features rolled out over the past few months. The one thing we really want is for Chrome to be less of a resource hog and we're optimistic that Chrome will once again be the light, power-packed browser that dazzled us all upon its release.
News Source: Android Police
