It will help you improve your skills and understand how to start this journey!
Probably if you already know me I am an user of Facebook. I don’t want to talk about all the issues of privacy and data expose (also if I am careful and disable stuff) but how you can improve your desktop and mobile experience with Firefox to avoid tracking from facebook!
I already talked about this browser extension 3 years ago when I released the first version but I want to promote better my open source tools, so why not start with this browser extension?
You can install on Firefox from here, on Chrome is not available anymore for a DMCA notice that in Mozilla’s store I was able to fix it instead of Chrome. It is like another reason to abandon that browser and to switch to another one that is better.
Anyway I have a little experience with facebook like with this extension that is not available anymore for a DMCA or this bug that I found on Facebook android app years ago.
Let’s go back to the point of this article.
Facebook has a similar behavior of Google, that at every link will do a redirect from their servers to the URL itself. In few words they track you also for the link that you open from the website.
So for Firefox there is a tiny extension that remove this behavior from Google pages, there is also one for Reddit.
This is called outbounds links that are made for track you and at the same time slowdown the web experience because they redirect you.
So I chose to do it also for Facebook.
This extension was based to a Grasemonkey script but because now the Facebook’s UI is more React based wasn’t working better in all the cases.
So I implemented more filters and exception and I need your help to understand when a Facebook click is broken to improve it.
You can open a ticket at https://github.com/Mte90/facebook-direct-links
One of the interesting stuff that I learned developing with this extension is how much is awful a UI with a lot of JavaScript (I implemented a MutationObserver to get the click every time) but also how they break HTML.
Yes a lot of buttons in the Facebook page are anchors (so links) with inside buttons or other HTML input field!
Yes you can see easily on the Facebook events page as admin in the various buttons to set the event itself.
So you can understand that is not easy to do an extension that remove outbounds links easily because of this s**t in the page.