How do I load a series of different URLs into different windows/tabs as fast as possible?

November 15, 2004 11:22 AM

How do I load a series of different URLs into different windows/tabs as fast as possible? The reason I ask is that a regular train ride I take stops for about 15 seconds at a station with wireless access. I'd like to load pages which I can then read for the rest of the trip but even opening new windows and launching bookmarks is manual and slow. Any ingenious ideas?
posted by vacapinta to computers & internet (11 comments total)

In firefox, you can open all your tabs, then bookmark them as a group of tabs to a folder.

Then when you hit the stop, open that bookmark, and it should load them all in one step.
posted by mathowie at 11:27 AM on November 15, 2004

Yeah, what Matt said. Also, you could load the pages at your home, before boarding the train, hibernate the laptop, and then start it up when you board. Less of a heist movie feel to it, but it might be more reliable.
posted by Hildago at 11:30 AM on November 15, 2004

You could make one local HTML doc with all the links in it that you are interested in, and set it as your home page for the trip. When you are at the station, click home and then use a bookmarklet to open all the links.
posted by jessamyn at 11:36 AM on November 15, 2004

are you trying to load arbitrary links that you've decided to follow while looking at pre-loaded pages earlier in your journey? or hoping to refresh oft-updated pages like mefi? or hoping to grab related pages (like all new topic pages from mefi)? or... solutions might be different depending on what you want.
posted by andrew cooke at 11:42 AM on November 15, 2004

Only slightly different than what Matt just said, but if you organize a bunch of separate Firefox bookmarks into a subfolder, you'll get an "open in tabs" option in that subfolder when you go there from the Bookmarks menu. This opens them all at once, in the same window, in multiple tabs.
posted by scarabic at 12:12 PM on November 15, 2004

Ditto with Opera: file 'em in a folder, and when you select the folder all bookmarks can be opened simultaneously.
posted by five fresh fish at 12:12 PM on November 15, 2004

I use Firefox with the "TabBrowser" extension, and it works great to manage multiple tabs like you're describing.

If you know what you'd like to read ahead of time, though, you might want to just look into the "offline browsing" options that are available--I'm not familiar with the current choices on that front, but you should theoretically have your PC cache a whole bunch of pages before you leave in the morning.
posted by LairBob at 12:34 PM on November 15, 2004

Also, see if the sites you're interested in have a low-bandwidth/PDA version, and/or if they have full-text RSS or Atom feeds, get them instead of the HTML.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 12:52 PM on November 15, 2004

Yeah, offline browsing. Something like "Plucker" that goes out and scrapes the pages you designate while you sleep.
posted by mecran01 at 2:37 PM on November 15, 2004

Thanks. The first answer is what I was looking for. I use Firefox but didnt know it could do that.

Jessamyn's bookmarklets is also a good idea for a secondary use: Being able to open up, say, ask.mefi and grabbing the first five posts or so...

I could do this in the morning before leaving but honestly, I am one of those people that is always rushing out the door as it is...
posted by vacapinta at 3:58 PM on November 15, 2004

When you are at the station, click home and then use a bookmarklet to open all the links.

Damn, I thought I had a great idea based on this tidbit. I was thinking I could open all of my "daily" links on my del.icio.us page in tabs like I manually do each day. But because of the way del.icio.us is set up, the categories get int he way, so when I use the "open all links" bookmarklet, it prompts me "do you want to open all 407 links?" No. No I don't.

I guess the same thing can be done with the RSS feed for a particular del.icio.us page, but I don't have much experience with feed readers, etc.

[I still appreciate the bookmarklet link, jessamyn!]
posted by terrapin at 10:08 AM on November 16, 2004