954339 - Show full versions of shortened URLs in tooltips

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Instantbird Graveyard :: Conversation, defect)

Description

[aleth [:aleth]]

*** Original post on bio 906 at 2011-07-09 18:36:00 UTC ***

Twitter's website has the nice feature that you can see the ultimate destination of shortened URLs as a tooltip.

Of course in principle it would be possible to follow any shortened URL and immediately replace it with its expanded version, but that's probably quite an overhead compared to the tooltip on-demand solution.

Comment 1

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

*** Original post on bio 906 at 2011-07-09 18:43:07 UTC ***

(In bug 954326 (bio 893) comment #0)

> It's also sad that this doesn't resolve all URLs (it only resolves t.co URLs).
> The twitter.com website uses an undocumented (private?)
> https://api.twitter.com/1/urls/resolve.json call to resolve other URLs.


Note: if we can't use the twitter API (or another "trusted" API) for that, the only way to resolve the URL is to do an HTTP request on each of the received URLs to see if they return a redirection to another URL. I don't think this is acceptable, as it reveals your IP.

Comment 2

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

*** Original post on bio 906 at 2011-07-09 18:44:10 UTC ***

Or we would need to add a list of trusted shortened URL providers that are safe to resolve (tinyurl, bit.ly, ...).

Comment 3

[aleth [:aleth]]

*** Original post on bio 906 at 2011-07-09 19:46:45 UTC ***

Twitter itself only seems to resolve URLs from some internally trusted list of providers. I had indeed assumed there was an API for this (otherwise not much is gained compared to just clicking the link, as you point out in #1).

Comment 4

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

*** Original post on bio 906 at 2011-10-21 02:23:00 UTC ***

(In reply to comment #1)
> (In bug 954326 (bio 893) comment #0)
> 
> > It's also sad that this doesn't resolve all URLs (it only resolves t.co URLs).
> > The twitter.com website uses an undocumented (private?)
> > https://api.twitter.com/1/urls/resolve.json call to resolve other URLs.
> 
> 
> Note: if we can't use the twitter API (or another "trusted" API) for that, the
> only way to resolve the URL is to do an HTTP request on each of the received
> URLs to see if they return a redirection to another URL. I don't think this is
> acceptable, as it reveals your IP.

Note that we can't use the Twitter API (or at least I can't figure out how to use it).

I tried to find a library to resolve shortened URLs using their own APIs, but nothing popped up. I'm in favor of having a method that, given a URL, checks if it's in our set of URLs that can be resolved and then attempts to resolve it using an API. If it's unknown we just leave it as is. If we were to do it this way, I'd think we should implement it across all protocols, not just as part of the Twitter protocol (people post shortened links often now).

Comment 5

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

On the behalf of Florian:
Closing bugs related to the Instantbird UI as WONTFIX, as the development of the standalone chat client Instantbird has stopped. Instantbird users are encouraged to migrate to Thunderbird. The user interface of instant messaging in Thunderbird will feel familiar, as the Thunderbird IM support started as a fork of Instantbird.