Why does Safari add a weird extension to YouTube links?

Question

When I click on a YouTube video the browser always adds this extension to the link: "&frags=pl%2Cwn".

Example links:

• Normal link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Example123
• Link in Safari: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Example123&frags=pl%2Cwn

This problem only occurs when I use my MacBook Pro in Safari (version 12.0.2).

Both links work, I've tried it on multiple computers / different web browsers and as far as I see there's absolutely no difference.

When I click on a video in YouTube the link gets added automatically, but I can remove it manually and the page just loads again without the extension (like a refresh of the page).

My questions are:

• Why does this happen?
• Has anybody else encountered this problem (Maybe it's a user-specific problem)?

Answer 1

The Youtube webapp is adding that to the link (or URL, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL).

The characters after the question mark in the link is the query string (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_string). It's one of the ways data can be passed to the server. The "v" parameter specifies which video to show. The ampersand ("&") separates parameters.

I can't find any reference as to what the "frags" parameter does. "%2C" is a comma (",") that's been percent-encoded (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding), so that part is setting the "frags" parameter to "pl,wn".

It's definitely not a problem. Everything is fine.