ClearURLs is an extension I've used for about a year, but I've recently disabled for the time being.

On the surface, ClearURLs is an excellent extension and it provides all the things it claims to, and it works, exactly as described.

The problem really comes from when it doesn't work- and how annoying it is to deal with in those situations.

ClearURLs lacks what I would call an extremely essential feature for an extension like this. A Whitelist. When ClearURLs breaks something, your only option(s) are to report it to the developer, and disable it until you are past whatever thing it broke, and then turn it back on.

This is tremendously annoying. To make matters worse, from what I can tell- the development of this extension has been relatively stale in the last few years. I'm sure the developer has plenty of good reasons why they haven't been working on it too much, but that doesn't change the reality of the situation.

Whitelisting has been an issue on their issue tracker for over 4 years. There's been an open merge request that added the feature for at least a year which hasn't been merged, and in that time, there's only been a handful of commits, usually just what I consider "maintenance mode" sorts of pushes. Stuff like "oh firefox changed a thing, I'll just remove this little bit here then" stuff.

On top of that, it's clear that the issue tracker is full of reports, many of which are clear duplicates and it really isn't being maintained all that well. Obviously developing extensions takes time and effort, like any software so I won't really hold that against them, but still- it seems a little scatterbrained to me.

Regardless, ClearURLs is fine for what it is, I just think a few small feature upgrades would take it from being just pretty good sometimes to truly being excellent, and arguably an essential online privacy extension. It just currently annoys me too much to use it regularly.