Per the spec [0], a URL can hold at least 8,000 characters.

> It is RECOMMENDED that all senders and recipients support, at a minimum, URIs with lengths of 8000 octets in protocol elements. Note that this implies some structures and on-wire representations (for example, the request line in HTTP/1.1) will necessarily be larger in some cases.

Mainstream browsers support at least 64,000 characters [1], and Chrome supports up to 2MB [2].

[0]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110#section-4.1-5

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/417184/

[2]: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/s...

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medv 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Chrome limit is 2MB, Firefox is 1MB, WebKit is no limit.

Here is the Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky:

- https://medv.io/goto/crime-and-punishment-by-fyodor-dostoevs...

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caminanteblanco 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

This unfortunately immediately crashed my android firefox nightly browser. Amusingly it loaded the page, but one click on the address bar sent me straight to the home screen

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maxloh 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For what it's worth, there might be a 2GB limit on the iOS side.

https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-corelibs-foundation/blob/...

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spicyusername 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Incredible.

My absolute favorite thing about modernity is how enabled we are to riff on a riff of a riff.

In 1346, if a blacksmith came up with something cool, its quite possible that it died with them.

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gchamonlive 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Interesting, in Firefox mobile (actually fennec) if I tap the address bar, I get an empty text box.

EDIT: actually I can edit the URL, but it takes a while to load.

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oneseven 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

hmmm makes me wonder if you could train llms on gzipped text. would save a lot of tokens that way.

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scotty79 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Works fine on Win11 Edge

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hallole 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

LOL Tapping the address bar crashed my Chrome on mobile.

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lurking_swe 10 hours ago | parent [-]

loaded OK for me on mobile safari.

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kylecazar 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Loaded fine for me too -- but like parent, tapping the address bar to share afterwards crashed it on Android here :)

	▲	nosrepa 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My Firefox on mobile seemingly handled it fine.

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berkes 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I guess the surveillance industry has enough incentives to make this ever larger, so they can fit more utm-trackers, campaign-ids, referal trackers and whatnot in URLs.

It's truly insane how large typical share-URLS for content on instagram, youtube or any other large platforms are. URLs that could've been example.com/t/some-large-enough-id?time=13337 are stuffed with hundreds of characters, just to gather more data on people using these links.

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dspillett 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Per the spec [0], a URL can hold at least 8,000 characters.

> It is RECOMMENDED that all senders and recipients support, at a minimum, URIs with lengths of 8000 octets in protocol elements.

It is always worth remembering that, unless you have already ensured that the content has been rendered into a URI-safe subset of ASCII, a character and an octet are not the same thing.

	▲	ghurtado 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Very good point indeed. In the worst case scenario, you would only have 1/5th of that capacity