What is your use case, why do you want to do this? Sounds like an xy problem
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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Two potential solutions to x in this case might be
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if the links are always the same, save them as bookmarks in a folder and you can right click to open all in new tabs
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if the links are all different, I think there are tools that can do that (spreadsheets, scripts)
I want to open hundreds or thousands of tabs
If you don't give more context we can't really help.
Why do you want to open 100s of tabs? Where do you get the links, are they generated by some other software, or you just saved them?
They are tabs I got somewhere else, probably another browser or session. Possibly from another system. Sometimes I have mass modified the URLs. Examole, strip tracker, remove duplicate, order url alphanunerically.
What matters is, they are in my clioboard, I want to open them all with one keypress, and it would be great , but not essential, if they would load one after the other, rather than all at once.
You still haven't answered to the question why, so follow the other general solutions, and I still think something is inherently wrong with your workflow, but for some reason you won't tell us.
Also search for bookmark managers, you can sync pages with them between browsers.
yeah probably opening the tabs is not the best solution anyways. maybe a python scraper would be an easier solution to whatever problem they have
Why do you need 100s of tabs? How do you navigate and make use of 100s of tabs?
Killing tabs is mean and cruel!
However, even with 100s of them, you just need to jump into the address bar and type some letters of the tab's address and Firefox will offer you to switch to it.
I never have more than ten tabs open. With my bookmarks I just type like "bookstack" and I'm there. Seems like its the same though so to each their own.
I regularly handle 1500-2000 tabs, tab manager plus, order by domain, session manager and about 50 more addons help me stay on top of it all.
Thats insane. But doesn't necessarily answer why you would need thousands of tabs actually open. It just sounds like so much effort to keep tabs open when you could just bookmark them and use a keyword to instantly go there when you need to.
I find the bookmark manager terrible, I rather paste URL in notepad than endure the bookmark manager's UI. I do end up dumping thousands of tabs into the bookmark manager, but never in 30 years have I bothered to use a bookmark. Except for the bookmarks toolbar.
Keeping the extremely primitive bookmark manager organized would suck up more of my time than all other browser task combined.
This discussion not about the bookmark manager, it is about pasting tabs from my clipboard. And the answer has been found. Unfortunately it is a two click process.
And opening 100+ tabs at once still clogs up the system because they all load immediately.
Keeping the extremely primitive bookmark manager organized would suck up more of my time than all other browser task combined.
I use keywords for my bookmarks... way more effective then tabs... and it doesn't eat up computing power or RAM
Oh, I do not use that. I use the toolbar with folders and I add keywords to each bookmark. Usually the keyword is the name as I would type it quickly. Which has the nice effect of just taking me where I want to go.
You're being extremely vague on the use cases for thousands of damn tabs. Which in itself just sounds like a nightmare to ever have to lay eyes on. So I'll leave that mystery to you. But having to have thousands of tabs open sounds either malicious or inefficient. Because there is no way a nice work flow comes from 2000 tabs.
I use URLList for this
Looks good, but can it open tabs from multiple URLs in the clioboard ?
You paste them into a the addon's window and it'll open them all, yes.
You cant have an addon that open larg blocks of urls and doesn’t load them but does show its titles on each tab; If you are showing the title of the tab is because the page has been loaded at some point
I would like the browser to throttle the rate of tab openning, something like 1 per 2 second, and maybe waiting until no more than 10 that are currently loading. Because when I try to open 100 tabs it chokes my system for about 5 minutes and sometimes even trigger the remote host's anti-ddos defence so that all the tabs end up broken and I have to reload them a second time.
But that's really the second point.
The first point is "Open tabs from clipboard URLs"
I did find something in the mean time.
It works, but it's a two step process, instead of a single click toolbar button like what I had previously.
It is Copy/Paste and Save tabs list by Alan
You just have the link texts in a text editor one at each line, then select all and drag the selection to tabs toolbar.
But yeah, it does become an issue if you try it with thousands of tabs... It should work, but probably chokes quite a bit.
while read p; do firefox "$p" done <file.txt
Unfortunately, the tabs open in a seemingly random window
Assuming you know what you're doing, maybe some script? At least on linux something like this seems to work:
#!/bin/bash
urls_file="${HOME}/path/to/url_list.txt";
sleep_time=1;
while read -r line;
do
firefox "${line}";
sleep ${sleep_time};
done < "${urls_file}";
edit: heh, tried to delete this as irrelevant, as I entirely missed the clipboard & requirement for a button IN firefox.. but it didn't really delete it seems. Oh well, leaving this in for laughs.
Anyhoo, if you need to speed up/throttle the link opening somehow, maybe add some incremental counter there and skip sleeping if counter < 10 or whatever.
On windows (where I am trapped), I can make a script read the clipboard (or even a script directly in my clipboard manager, ditto) but what I don't know is how to make firefox open URLs in a specific window.
why does it need to be from the clipboard?
Because that is where they are and is convenient for me. I already have a matching, copy selected tabs to clipboard, button.
so you copy opened tabs to clipboard and want to re-open another copy?
It is a list of URLs, it can come from many places. I'm not just closing and reopening 100+ tabs from and to the same place. Example copying tabs from one computer, or vm, to another.
The list could also be out of a text editor.
You know that if you setup a mozilla account, you can view tabs from any device/vm? and its supposed to be e2ee
Yes, I use that between my main pc and phone. But doing that for multiple hundreds of tabs gets quite clunky compare to copy and pasting lists of urls.
I loved to see the statistics on how often you use each of those tabs
It really depends what the content of each tab is and if it has what I'm looking for. The whole thing about having loaded tabs versus bookmarks is that you can search and skim them, without a 5-10 second pause every time you go to the next one. Not that the bookmark manager even has a "magazine" system that would let you skip between bookmark with a single button like a tab does. Still this is very far from optimal. Firefox has an opaque tab data discard system and no tools at all for searching all content in all tabs. It also lacks a automatic AI tab categorization feature. You can't even assign tags to tabs, even manually.
if firefox is the default browser, I guess just start "" "https://your.url.here.foo", as per https://superuser.com/a/36730
otherwise, I guess you could just cd to firefox's directory and do the same firefox.exe urlhere
as for specific window... yea that might be tad hard. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/CommandLineOptions doesn't seem to have any way to indicate any specific instance/window from cli.
could be firefox handles those internally, kinda seems like urls open up in the window which was last active. So.. I guess you could start the script by starting firefox with --new-instance or --new-window, and patiently wait until urls are open? I guess.
Maybe it's time I learn to use violent monkey
If you know Javascript you could maybe create a bookmarklet that does this. I just don't know if it can access your clipboard.
That's a great idea, I'm giving it a try.