Monday, February 14, 2005

A neat FireFox Trick

As I noted in a recent blog post, I've been using the Firefox browser as my main browser on my home workstation. This has proved to be successful - I like a lot of the features of the browser (although to be fair, much of what I actually enjoy most comes from 3rd party extensions rather than to firefox itself). One key Firefox feature I do love is tabbed browsing. This enables me to have a single window with a large number of related pages open at once. The update all tabs makes a co-ordinated update of all the pages quick and easy.

It turns out that if you feed Firefox a set of URLs, separated by teh "|" character, FF can open a window, with each page in a separate tab. Going further you can create a desktop short cut, with the shortcut pointing to the "|" delimited string of site names to create a short cut to a tabbed set, all in one window. For some things I do, this is really handy. You all probably knew this, but I thought it was cool. Now all I've got to so is to work out how to save as set of open tabs (opened by manual browsing) as a single shortcut from within FireFox.

2 comments:

Absoblogginlutely! said...

Unless i'm misunderstanding your question, you can just go to bookmarks, bookmark this and then select the option to bookmark all the tabs into a folder.
When you want to open them all again you select the open in tabs option.
I didn't know about opening the urls as | seperated - that is cool - thanks.

Anonymous said...

To save a number of manually-opened tabs, go to Tab - Save Current Tab Session (you can also give this session a more friendly name via Tab - Load Tab Session - Rename).
To reopen the session at a later time, go to Tab - Load Tab Session and choose your session. All tabs will be reopened and can then be refreshed in the way you have described.