Link Fixer Thing 0.4.6

Link Fixer Thing is a free Firefox extension that fixes links. It parses links within web pages and now fixes 3 different annoyances.

I originally wrote this extension to fix a web annoyance Ive had to deal with too many times. I use Hotmail as one of my email addresses, and I frequently receive email from eBay with that account. Email from eBay is typically full of links that utilize ampersands. Hotmail likes to change them from the original & to & within the links, rendering them unusable. This was a major irritation. Thus, LFT was born.

A second annoyance I see only occasionally are backslashes in place of forward slashes in page links. It used to be more prevalent a few years back. I believe older versions of Microsoft Office programs created links like this when saving documents as web pages.

The third major annoyance is the way Hotmail messages embed links within a javascript function. It interferes with my desire to right click on them and create a bookmark or open in a new tab, etc. So I added the ability to strip the javascript off of the links as well. However, this function is turned off by default.

In the options dialog, I provide the ability to individually select which annoyances are eliminated. By default, only URLs containing the string hotmail are checked. You may change this string or parse all web pages if that better suits your needs. Also, you may disable the extension without having to restart the browser, or turn on debugging mode.

I have a few ideas in the works for future enhancements including another eBay related annoyance. If you have any ideas for future releases, send them my way. Im sure there are other link related annoyances to tackle.