Our take
Inactiveno commits in over a year- Activity
- 19
- Community
- 38
- Issues
- 43
- Pull requests
- 20
+70 stars in the last 30 days
- Slower to close issues than 99% of the projects we track
ClearURLs has a focused privacy use case and a substantial user base, but its lack of recent commits and releases, combined with highly concentrated contributions, makes its maintenance outlook a concern.
Good fit if
- You want automatic URL tracking cleanup in Firefox or a supported Chrome-based browser.
- You value the included protections against link auditing and certain forms of tracking injection.
- You can accept LGPL-3.0 terms and the possibility that maintenance may remain limited.
Look elsewhere if
- You need evidence of active development: there have been no commits in over a year and no release in over a year.
- You need a project with broadly distributed maintenance, since most contributions come from one person.
- You rely on fast support or fixes: issues take a long time to close, and no pull requests were merged recently.
All health signals
| Last commit | 2025-07-27 (1.2 years ago) |
|---|---|
| Commits, last 90 days | 0 |
| Releases, last 12 months | 0 (latest 1.27.3, 2025-02-05) |
| Contributors | 30 (top contributor: 94% of commits) |
| Issues closed, last 90 days | 20 (typically closed in 1152 days) |
| Pull requests merged, last 90 days | 0 |
| Project age | 9 years |
Checked on 2026-10-13 with the GitHub API.
Project history
Daily GitHub snapshots since Oct 7, 2026. History covers stars and forks; health signals are not tracked historically.
Stars
5,136Forks
152Change since Nov 13, 2026: -1 stars·0 forks
Overview
ClearURLs is a browser extension that removes tracking parameters from URLs as you browse. This helps reduce the information that links can reveal about how you arrived at a page, without requiring you to clean each address manually.
It is intended for people who want privacy protections built into their browser, especially when sharing or opening links that include campaign tags or other tracking data. The project says it is optimized for Firefox and some Chrome-based browsers.
Key Features
- Removes tracking elements from URLs automatically in the background.
- Provides a tool for cleaning multiple URLs at once.
- Can redirect through tracking services to the destination without using the service as a middleman.
- Adds a context-menu option to copy cleaned links.
- Optionally blocks some common advertising domains.
- Blocks hyperlink auditing, also known as ping tracking, and aims to prevent ETag tracking.
- Prevents tracking injection through the History API and URL rewriting on Google and Yandex search results.
Use Cases
- Privacy-conscious browser users who want tracking parameters removed without manually editing links.
- People sharing links who want to avoid passing along campaign or referral tracking data.
- Users who often follow links through redirect services and want to reach the destination directly.
- Users who want a browser extension to address several URL-based tracking techniques in one place.
What you need
Detected in the repository
- JavaScript (main language on GitHub)
License in plain words
LGPL-3.0weak copyleft
- Commercial use: yes
- Modify and redistribute: yes
- You must keep: the license notice
- Share your changes: yes, changes to the library itself, when you distribute it; linking from closed code is allowed
- Includes an explicit patent grant from the contributors:
A summary, not legal advice: the LICENSE file is what applies.
Getting Started
Install ClearURLs from the Firefox Add-ons listing or the Microsoft Edge Add-ons listing. See the repository README for further details and development artifacts.
Considerations
The project is marked inactive based on having no commits in over a year. Although it has 30 contributors overall, contributions are heavily concentrated in one person. It has closed some issues recently, but the median time to close an issue is long, and there have been no recent pull-request merges. The latest release is also more than a year old.
The README describes compatibility with Firefox and some Chrome-based browsers, rather than all browsers. The repository is licensed under LGPL-3.0, so teams should review its obligations before incorporating or redistributing the extension. The project lists no runtime, database, or other deployment requirements in the supplied data.
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