Links Like This is a Firefox extension I wrote last year that allows you to automatically open multiple links from a webpage. I released the first version in May of 2007 but never really went back to update or improve it; that's about to change.

During a recent conversation about Links Like This, I realized how poorly I designed the interface. For example, after right-clicking on a link and selecting "Open Links Like This...", you used to see this confirmation dialog:

It's a modal dialog, meaning that you can't interact with the page until you've closed the dialog. The problem with this is that, oftentimes, you can't see all of the links that have been chosen as "links like this" until the dialog is closed. This problem becomes even more severe when the dialog reads "Open these 143 links?" and you can only see two or three of the highlighted links.

With the latest update, selecting "Open Links Like This..." from the context menu yields this dialog:

It's not modal, meaning that you can still scroll up and down the webpage when the dialog is visible, but it will stay on top of the webpage until you deal with it. Additionally, selected links are no longer marked with an ugly red border:

Now, they have a pleasant yellow background.

Much better, no? This small upgrade is the first of several I have planned for the next few weeks.

You can install this update at Mozilla Add-ons; if you find Links Like This useful, please consider writing a quick review on the right side of this page. Once a couple of users have given it positive reviews, I can ask Mozilla to make it a public add-on, which would make it available to all users, not just those logged in to Mozilla Add-ons.

I've updated the Links Like This Firefox extension with the following features:

Links Like This is an extension for the Firefox Web browser that allows you to open many links in a page simply by right-clicking on one link and selecting the "Open Links Like This..." option. It will use the link you clicked on as an example of the type of link you want to open.

• It now pays attention to whether the link you clicked on is already in your history and chooses similar links accordingly.
• It will no longer open duplicate links.
• It now removes the red dotted border from the suggested links if you choose not to open them.
• The confirmation dialog now contains the number of links that are going to be opened. "Open these links?" and "Open these 472 links?" are fundamentally different questions. :-)

You can install the latest version from the Links Like This homepage.

After giving up on GoogleTabs, I was thinking about how there is no acceptable (by my standards, anyway) Firefox extension for opening multiple links. Linky is too general, just opening large swaths of links, and Snap Links requires you to physically indicate every link that you want opened. An ideal extension should know the links that you want to open based on just one link out of the set.

I believe that I've written this suitable extension, and it's called Links Like This. The extension works like so: any time you right-click on a link, an option entitled "Open Links Like This..." is added to the context menu:

If you select that option, the extension will find all of the links in the page that are similar to the link you right-clicked on, highlight them, and then ask you to confirm that they are indeed the links that you want to open.

Unlike GoogleTabs, this extension is generalized to all websites. Due to its dynamic matching algorithm, it actually appears to work better than GoogleTabs on Google search pages, and in my experience so far, it works equally well with the other search engines and link-heavy sites like Digg/Netscape/Reddit or CraigsList.

You can install Links Like This from the Links Like This homepage. Feel free to describe any positive or negative experiences with it in the comment section below.