Redirect Urls With These Chrome Extensions
If you’re an advanced Chrome user, you’ll ultimately want to set up automatic URL redirects. Maybe you want to watch all of your YouTube videos on a minimalistic site ; maybe you love – or hate – switching to the mobile version of the site. You may be making the same typo every time you enter a specific URL. There are many Chrome extensions for URL redirection, each with their own strengths. We found two of the best options: simple and powerful.
Newbie
The easiest option is Switcheroo . This is easy to understand, although not very powerful. It allows you to edit existing redirects, but it doesn’t have as many bells and whistles as this. It’s easier to use than the more powerful but wobbly extensions.
To redirect the url, simply open the extension in your toolbar, enter the input url (as a standard part of every YouTube video url) and the output url (as a minimalist YouTube alternative ).
Typing is a little shaky: if you click before clicking Add, Switcheroo will forget everything you entered. So if you need to insert two lines, click Add after the first, then copy the second line and click Edit to add it. This is stupid, but this is not a killer.
Advanced
If you need more advanced features like wildcards, try the Requestly extension. It takes some work to figure it out, but in addition to URL redirection, it allows you to block specific URLs, inject scripts, or emulate various devices. (I use it to remove search terms from my Amazon links.) It’s a great option for developers or superusers.
Requestly also has a more complex interface, which you may find better or worse than Switcheroo. To add a new redirect, open the extension from the toolbar, click the “+” button in the upper right corner, and select ” Replace Host” (in blue) from the full-page menu.
On the security front, Switcheroo developer Randjar Abass told Lifehacker that his extension only stores data on your computer and not on any server. (You can read the Switcheroo source code on GitHub.) The Requestly privacy policy says that the extension does not store personal information or private URL redirect rules, but does store public rules (and your email address if you choose to log in with Google) on their servers. Both are safe as long as you don’t keep government secrets or serious crimes in your url redirects.