Bitly is one of the first and most popular URL shortening services that have continued to exist to this date. Bitly offers quick and painless creation of the short URLs for any website. These short links are very useful when you want to send a web page URL to a friend over social networks like Facebook or Twitter or over online chat apps like Snapchat. Basically, it gives you the ease and comfort when typing in URLs manually – instead of typing in a very long URL, you have to type in a few letters and you are done.
Usually, you have to copy-paste the URL on the Bitly website in order to get the shortened URL, but you can get the short URL for any web page opened in your web browser if you are using the Bitly web browser extension. This extension is available for three major web browsers – Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple Safari. Since these three web browsers cover the largest pie of internet users, Bitly extension is basically available for all the internet users.
After installing this Bitly extension in your web browser, you can browse to any web page that you want to create the short URL for and then click on the Bitly icon in the toolbar. This will show you a pop out window with the Bitly short URL already generated. It takes less than one second for the Bitly short URL to be created.
You can copy the short URL to the clipboard or share it through Twitter or Facebook. You can also add a title, add a tag and even customize the Bitly URL if needed. If you do not want the short URL to be auto-created, then you can turn of the Auto-create Bitlink on click option in the extensions settings.
Conclusion: Bitly can make a difference when you are sharing very long URLs over social networks. The Bitly extension for web browsers can help you instantly create short URLs with just one click, copy the short URL to clipboard or share it over Twitter or Facebook.
You can get the Bitly extension for web browsers from https://bitly.com/pages/tools.