Category Archives: GoogleTabs

Browser Add-ons, GoogleTabs, Links Like This

Links Like This gets some polish

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.

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Browser Add-ons, GoogleTabs, Links Like This, Mozilla Firefox, Programming

Building a better multi-link opener

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:

Opening links with Links Like This

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.

Links Like This marks the links it will 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.

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Browser Add-ons, Google, GoogleTabs, Programming

Decommissioning GoogleTabs

I’ve decided to retire GoogleTabs, one of the very first extensions I ever wrote. GoogleTabs adds a context-menu option to open all of the Google search results on the current page in tabs.

I made this decision for several reasons:

  • I don’t have time to keep up with Google. Every time they change the HTML for any of their search result pages, I have to update the extension and release a new version.
  • I don’t use the extension. All of my other extensions came about to fill one of my browsing needs, and in a few cases, other people found the extension useful as well. Since I never really used GoogleTabs, I don’t feel the same need to keep it current.
  • There are better solutions. There are other extensions like Snap Links and Linky that do the same thing, but on a wider scale. It doesn’t make sense to have a Google-specific version when you can have one extension that mass-opens links on all webpages.

According to Mozilla Addons, GoogleTabs was downloaded a total of 95,322 times (plus the downloads directly from my site), so it had a pretty good run. Rest in peace, GoogleTabs.

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Browser Add-ons, GoogleTabs, Mozilla Firefox, OPML Support, RSS Ticker, Slashdotter, Software, URL Fixer

Extension Updates

Update: URL Fixer was acquired and is now hosted at http://urlfixer.org/

I’ve just updated all of my extensions to be compatible with Firefox 2.0. They’re all available for download at my site, and they’ll all eventually be available at Mozilla Addons as well. No new features for these updates, just compatibility fixes.

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