I wanna know...have you ever seen the rain?

May 12, 2007 6:27 AM

Is there a way for me to send someone a bundle of URLs in such a way that all the URLs will just open in Firefox as tabs, without the person having to actually go through and click on each one?

I see there's a spec for something like this in css3

...but it will take too long for me to figure out how to build it by myself, and anyway, I don't know if that's even implemented in Gecko. I'm hoping there's some kind of pre-made tool that does this.

What I'm trying to actually do: I'm going to have a phone call with a client, wherein we discuss various websites of my choosing. I don't want to sent a list of URLs and tell her to click on each one; I think that's obnoxious. I want to send an email and say something like "double-click on this, and it will open 10 tabs, and then we'll go through them one at a time." I'm open to other solutions that will solve the same problem.

posted by bingo to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Could you have her install Session Saver, and then send her a saved session?
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 6:36 AM on May 12, 2007

How about coding an executable, that will run Firefox, and then make it load the pages? Should be easy enough to do with a batch file, or AutoIt, or similar.
posted by Solomon at 6:45 AM on May 12, 2007

If the client is going to have to click on something anyway (like tabs) why don't you instead create a webpage with the list of links that either opens the pages in a frame or pops open new windows.

Another option is to send her a bookmark file with all the links in a bookmark folder. Firefox lets you right-click on the folder and "open in tabs", which opens them all in tabs.
posted by FreezBoy at 6:51 AM on May 12, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

Have them download the 'Linky' extension which allows you to highlight multiple URL's and then right-click to open all in tabs.
posted by i_am_a_Jedi at 7:06 AM on May 12, 2007

The TabMixPlus extension also lets you open multiple links in multiple tabs -- send your client a webpage with the URLs, have them highlight all of the URLs, right-click, choose "Open all links in tabs". The URLs may have to be working links, not just plain text, though.
posted by puritycontrol at 7:13 AM on May 12, 2007

Linky, linked above, can open both plaintext and hypertext links in multiple tabs.
posted by msbrauer at 7:46 AM on May 12, 2007

The way I would do this is to create a webpage with two frames. One small navigation frame at the top that would be a list of the 10 URLs (styled like tabs, or with "next" and "previous" buttons, or a select box, or however you want). And a large frame for the real content. All of the links in the navigation frame would target the content frame.

No extensions necessary, and it'll even work in IE4, in case your client forwards the email to a co-worker. Or Netscape Communicator.
posted by Plutor at 9:00 AM on May 12, 2007

According to lifehacker, you can indicate URLs you want to launch when launching firefox from the command-line.

So you can presumably email a shortcut (a .lnk file, not a .url) that launches firefox and as many tabs as you desire.
posted by misterbrandt at 9:14 AM on May 12, 2007

With Firefox you can use the same method in a shortcut that you use if you want your homepage to have multiple tabs. This is Windows-specific, but I doubt Firefox would disallow these kinds of arguments on other OSes.

Create a shortcut to Firefox, Alt-Enter (or right-click > properties) and enter a pipe-delimited list of sites in the "Target:" field, like so:

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" http://www.singshot.com/|http://www.google.com/|http://www.boingboing.net/

One caveat is that the browser will only open the first one if the browser is already open, so tell them to close Firefox first (or you can do some testing to see if this only happens just if "Restore Session" is enabled).
posted by rhizome at 10:14 AM on May 12, 2007

Both Windows Shortcuts and .urls are often blocked by email programs. Often, Zipping it up will get you around that.
posted by BaxterG4 at 8:02 PM on May 12, 2007