Greasemonkey to the rescue! Works in FF and Chrome, and any other browsers that support greasemonkey.

Get it on Userscripts.org

Direct install via github

The code repo.

Don't have greasemonkey? Drag this unhijack twitter bookmarklet to your toolbar and execute it on Twitter.com to unhijack your links. On Internet Explorer, you can right-click and select “Add to Favorites…”

A Little Background

On Monday evening I noticed that Twitter had launched new features for their link wrapper t.co. I'm hard pressed to call this Twitter's shortener because it wraps all links on Twitter and helps them fight spam.

Normally, the t.co features go unnoticed. For example, at least 6 months ago at the beginning of 2011 Twitter began replacing the href tags on twitter.com with the t.co wrapped link. I noticed this minor change during routine development work on http://chrome.bit.ly.

However, this latest change is causing the http:// to be hidden on links sent from the web interface. While this is helpful in saving a few characters per tweet, the side effect is a bit jarring. Specifically, if a user copies the text of a link, something like j.mp/eBzhRu, Twitter injects their t.co link instead of the selected text! This short video demonstrates this behavior http://j.mp/kOFbIi

It didn't take long to identify the offending behavior and a quick hack later via greasemonkey and the pain has stopped. The trick couldn't be more simple, cause the window.twttr.tco.displayToTco method to always return false. Easy enough

window.twttr.tco.displayToTco =function(){}

Comments thoughts and improvments are all welcome, hit me up on github or on twitter.com/gregory80.