[nileshtrivedi]

I find it annoying when people share direct URLs to PDFs at arxiv.org instead of the the abstract. However, if I were to use a redirect extension like this one, then my own click on the PDF link would get redirected back to the abstract page. To handle this, the redirect rule needs to consider the referer page too, with a possible exception if the referer is the same site as the destination.

[imurray]

I wrote firefox and chrome extensions that do exactly what you want:

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirectify/

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirectify/mhjmbf...

Source: https://github.com/imurray/redirectify

Sadly I never got around to making it configurable, so it's just a fixed table of rules for a handful of journal and pre-print sites.

[mook]

For something like that, on Android I find it fine to install the URL Forwarder app from F-droid and share the link to the app. That way you opt-in to the modification (I use it to load things with Archive.today from HN).

[godelski]

Dear god... this is a major pet peeve of mine. I frequently open the links on my phone and the pdf just eats data and results in a terrible reading experience.

The reason I open on my phone is because I find via places like HN, Twitter, Bsky, read the abstract, and then send the link back to my computer for later reading (Firefox send tabs). 99.9% of the time I do not want the pdf...