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The interwebs seem to be infested with shortened urls (Twitter I'm looking at you). I'm always reluctant to click these as it is a leap into the unknown. Are there any browser plugins or Greasemonkey scripts that will auto-expand the shortened URL or give me a tooltip with the resolved target?

I've seen LongUrl.org, which has an API I could use to roll my own, but I'd like to avoid the effort if this is a solved problem.

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Does this not have both longurl.org/tools ? –  random Dec 10 '09 at 14:50
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4 Answers

Not a general answer but if you're following Twitter, Feeddemon has support for this, it will show a tooltip with the complete url.

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There are several plugins and GM scripts to do this if you are using Firefox (I don't know about other browsers off the top of my head). https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13140 is the first one that came up in a quick search.

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Somebody already did the work for you on Firefox : LongURL Mobile Expander :

You should always know where a link takes you before clicking on it. Services like TinyURL.com make that difficult. LongURL Mobile Expander uses the LongURL.org web services to let you know where shortened links really go.

Not all the comments are positive, though.


You can also look at Long URL Please

Short urls (eg http://tinyurl.com/123) simply redirect to some other page on the internet - you can't tell what website they link to by looking at the link. This plugin fixes this by transparently replacing any of these links when every web page loads.

Uses the api provided by http://www.longurlplease.com to determine where short urls actually link to.


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After a bit more searching I found this article on a Greasemonkey script that expands URLs and more:

before screenshot

after screenshot

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