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A use case (I am assuming others would have different use cases for this overall feature)

  • Preferring teddit.net or libredd.it over reddit.com and old.reddit.com for its lesser resource usage, and increased privacy

What would have to be allowed for this use case

  • Have a rule (or filter?) to keep all text after the domain (example.com/1f94j1 -> example-redirect.com/1f94j1), which works for alternative frontends to Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Wikipedia, Search Engines, YouTube, and Map Viewers

The Privacy Redirect extension does this use case, but it will always be less performant, and a potential security hazard

Security hazard: Personally I've been burned by both Nano Defender and Stylish in the past, with Nano Defender stealing login cookies, and Stylish data mining excessively (Stylish's data mining was bad enough to warrant the fork to Stylus, which is still maintained and functionally works better than Stylish)

Since then I've refrained from installing any niche extensions, expect for Privacy Redirect and Bypass Paywalls Clean. I've found that using teddit.net was essential to get good search results on Reddit, and its interface is a better old.reddit.com to me, so the tedium of replacing reddit.com with teddit.net manually was too great to not use Privacy Redirect

    This does feel like an "extension" use-case, as I doubt many users will want to provide manual regexes, and I'm not sure it's the job of the web browser to select and/or maintain appropriate replacements (what if one of these interfaces turns out to be doing something untoward in future, or sells out?)

    Noting your comments on extensions "selling out" and stealing cookies or mining data though, is that the root issue here that leads to this request arising? Perhaps this is where better clarity around what an extension can do is needed? Orion controls what domains an extension can run on just now (with options to be prompted by default).

    I don't know if the extension API would make it viable to restrict egress and web requests from extensions, but that seems the next logical step to preserve privacy and avoid data exfiltration from extensions. Even if it was a whitelist that users could review and edit in settings, that might offer some assurance that extensions can't just exfiltrate things to servers of their own choosing (or do telemetry!)

    Anyone know if this kind of egress management/filtering is viable in the webextensions API?

      2 years later

      What does your feature entail? What is it for? How will it affect existing workflows or user experience?
      I understand there are extensions for this, but, personally I'd love to see a vetted solution for rewrite rules built into the core browser.

      "Like Kagi has!" -- but inside Orion.

      What are the exact ways that you see a user using your proposed feature? Please go into as much detail as possible, and provide examples of how other browsers/apps implement this feature, if applicable. If your feature suggestion adds on to an existing feature, how would it work into it to extend its usefulness?
      Redirect twitter.com -> nitter.com. Redirect reddit.com -> old.reddit.com.

      At the browser level.

        Merged 2 posts from Rewrite rules in the core browser.
          7 months later

          I would like to have this primarily as a feature to simply block whole sites (redirecting to a new tab).

          Just like JavaScript and cookies can be blocked, this feature would be put under the website tab of the settings along with them.

          I don't understand that this is very high maintenance (essentially find and replace before sending a web request) or a niche feature given a lot of other other easy access advanced tools already in the browser.

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