Chrome is a popular web browser and one of the most popular browsers in use today. It’s also one of the most popular browsers in history, with over 1 billion active users. One of Chrome’s features is its ability to shorten URLs. Shortened URLs are a way of linking to a web page or document without having to enter the full URL. Chrome stores shortened URLs in its address bar and can access them from any web page or document that has an address bar entry for chrome://shorteners/. When you type a shortened URL into Chrome, it will show you a list of all the websites that have linked to that URL. You can click on one of these websites and see a list of all the pages and documents that have been linked to that shortened URL. You can also right-click on any of these links and select “Link this page to my computer.” This will open up a new window with all the pages and documents that have been linked to your shortened URL on your computer. If you want to remove any of these links from your computer, you can do so by clicking on “X” next to each link in the list and then clicking on “Remove link.”

The URL Shortening services officially supported at this time are: bit.ly, cli.gs, ff.im, goo.gl, is.gd, nyti.ms, ow.ly, post.ly, su.pr, & tinyurl.com.

Before

When you encounter a shortened URL you are pretty much on your own in deciding whether to trust that link or not. It would really be nice if you could just hover your mouse over those links and know where they will lead ahead of time.

After

Once you have the extension installed you are ready to access that link viewing goodness. Please note that you will need to reload any pages that were open prior to installing the extension.

For our first example we chose a shortened URL from “bit.ly”. As you can see the entire link behind the shortened URL is displayed very nicely…no hidden surprises there!

Note: There are no options to worry with for the extension.

Another perfect result for the “goo.gl URL” shown below. View Thru will certainly remove a lot of the stress related to clicking on shortened URLs.

Bonus Find

Just out of curiosity we looked for a shortened URL not listed as being officially supported at this time. We found one with the “http://nyti.ms/” domain and View Thru showed the link perfectly…so be sure to give it a try on other services too.

Conclusion

If you worry about where a shortened URL will really lead you then the View Thru extension can help alleviate that stress.

Links

Download the View Thru extension (Google Chrome Extensions)