Clear Links

Makes website links more transparent and accessible, enhancing your awareness of your navigational security and privacy.

What is Clear Links?

"Clear Links" is a Chrome extension designed to make browsing safer and more transparent. It presents the destination of web links in an accessible tooltip that appears with a simple mouse-over, particularly highlighting external website links. You can customise this feature in the Options menu. While it doesn't screen for malicious links, it rather helps you identify them yourself, fostering safer browsing. It also incorporates the extension to support short URL services like goo.gl, bit.ly, and more.

Download

Stats

By: Christopher Bull

View on Chrome Web Store

Users: 579 ▼ -14

Rating: 5.00 (6)

Version: 3.3.0 (Last updated: 2024-02-16)

Creation date: 2017-05-30

Risk impact: High risk impact

Risk likelihood: Very low risk likelihood

Manifest version: 3

Permissions:

scripting
storage
identity
webNavigation

Host permissions:

http://*/
https://*/

Size: 185.34K

Email: ca*****@gmail.com

URLs: Privacy policy

Stats date:

Chrome-Stats Rank

# 36367 ▼ 447

Other rankings

#4416 in Workflow & Planning ▼ 6 #28 in destination keyword 29 #65 in links keyword 42 ▲ 25 #280 in identify keyword 52 ▲ 12

Other platforms

Not available on Firefox

Not available on Edge

Want to check extension ranking and stats more quickly for other Chrome extensions? Install Chrome-Stats extension to view Chrome-Stats data as you browse the Chrome Web Store.

Summary

Analyze keywords

This is a user experience improvement extension that reveals web links' destination in a more user-friendly and customisable tooltip, simply by moving your mouse over a link; by default, it highlights a URL's domain for links to external websites (customisable in the extension's Options menu) and thus enables more transparent links, improving explicit awareness of your navigation to an external website. One potential use case for Clear Links is to make you more easily aware of phishing email scams by allowing you to inspect a link's destination domain and allowing you to check if the destination is as expected -- identifying malicious links.

It is important to note that this extension does not identify malicious links for you, instead, it informs you of links to external sites so you can make the decision yourself. By default, links to pages within the same website/hostname do not have a tooltip appear. This can be changed in the Options menu.

This will make a fine addition to your security and privacy digital toolbelt.

Short URL services supported: goo.gl, bit.ly, j.mp, t.co (partially)

Code repository and release notes can be viewed on GitHub: https://github.com/ChristopherBull/Clear-Links/

Keywords: URL, link, domain, hostname, Short URL, URL expander, URL expansion

User reviews

Tuan Nguyen, 2023-12-29

Great idea! Unobtrusive whilst being informative when you need it.

David Gullick, 2016-07-07

View all user reviews

Safety

Risk impact

Clear Links is risky to use as it requires a number of sensitive permissions that can potentially harm your browser and steal your data. Exercise caution when installing this extension. Review carefully before installing. We recommend that you only install Clear Links if you trust the publisher.