Browser plug-in idea: Launching a group of websites simultaneously – Updated: solution already exists

By Rajesh Setty on Sun 18 Dec 2005, 7:08 PM - 3 Comments

I hope somebody will create this plug-in for Firefox or any tabbed browser. Here is the background and the idea.

RSS changed the way we browse for information. Earlier you to go to an individual website and read stuff. Now, with a good blog reader (or RSS aggregator or whatever) we don’t have that problem. Manhy of my friends track hundreds of blogs and read them. This would not be possible without RSS. So, that is one part of the story. RSS won’t solve everything. You still need to visit several individual websites almost on a daily basis to do some of your work. The other day I counted and for me it’s about 14 different websites everyday. How can we solve this problem?

Here is a simple plug-in I thought would help. Store all the links to these “everyday” websites with a special del.icio.us tag and when you activate this plug-in, it opens all these websites in multiple tabs. When the first website opens up, you can continue to do your work and the other websites start getting loaded in the background (in other tabs)

You can save a ton of time. Thanks.

Update: Thanks to Derek Scruggs and Boris Bauer for showing me that this already exists. Boris kindly sent me the steps to do this. Here they are for the benefit of others.

For Firefox

1. Go to bookmarks2. Go to manage bookmarks3. Create a folder4.Group all the sites you want to open in one folder.5. Drag that folder in the bookmarks toolbar. (make sure this is enabled inthe View > toolbars section)6. Select the folder in the toolbar and select "open in tabs".

Thanks to both Derek and Boris again!

PS: Also thanks to Jason Siffring who posted another comment extending the logic. Thanks Jason.

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Anonymous on December 18th, 2005

Something similar to this already existis. If you have a folder of bookmarks, at the bottom of the list of sites will be a menu item called “open in tabs” that opens all the bookmarks in that folder.

Anonymous on December 18th, 2005

As stated above, this is possible today in Firefox. To take it a step further, you can automatically open a bunch of tabs whenever you start your browser.
In FF 1.5, just go to Tools, Options, General and click ‘Use Bookmark’ for your home page. Select a folder that contains bookmarks to your everday sites. Now, every time you start Firefox, it will automatically load all of those sites in tabs.

Anonymous on December 20th, 2005

You can do this both in Firefox 1.5 and in Mozilla 1.7.
I have each open to 27 unique “homepages” for a total of 54 different sites. (That number will be greatly reduced as I bring more of my favorite sites onto my blog and onto Yahoo and Google homepages. But it’s great to have this capacity.)
What’s REALLY great about multiple home pages in Firefox is the ability to scroll from tab to tab. That’s extraordinarily helpful in my work. Unfortunately, this capacity doesn’t appear to be available in Mozilla.
Vincent
http://www.MyLinkedinPowerForum.com