I’m not a fan of URL shortening services such as TinyURL. In my eyes they are nothing more than a security risk as you have no idea where a shortened URL is actually going to take you. That’s a huge problem and hence why I will not click on a URL from one of those services and automatically delete any comments containing shortened URLs. For a while now I’ve been hoping somebody would create some kind of plug-in for Firefox that would automatically expand shortened URLs.
Well somebody has released a plug-in that offers exactly this service. The plug-in is called Long URL Please. Simply put when a page loads Long URL Please replaces all the shortened ULRs with the URL that the URL shortening service redirects to. I installed it and am testing it on a virtual machine to see how well it works. So far it’s doing a pretty decent job although it seems to require knowledge of each shortening services and will only work with those known services. Either way if this plug-in pans out it will be one of those must installs for Firefox.