I regularly have lots of tabs open in Firefox; such that when I restart Firefox I have everything I need to hand. As I can have many projects on the go at any one time the number of tabs open can be in the hundreds. Firefox handles this well apart from…
Occasionaly I will have multiple instances of Firefox open and fail to close them in the correct order, ie leaving the instance with the open tabs until the last. The menu option: History, Recently Closed Windows, Restore all Windows has sometimes come to my rescue but on many occasions hasn’t worked. 😦
Being ‘belt & braces’ and so regularly bookmark all open tabs using CTRL+SHIFT+D, just in case.
I recently started using the Firefox Bookmark functionality in a more proactive manner. Truth betold – I was forced to learn more about bookmarking when an unfortunate series of circumstances meant I had lost several weeks of open tabs, an attempt to restore them from backups plus restore those not backed up had lead me to have hundreds of tabs open. Many of them open two or more times.
Now there are a number of Add-ons/Extensions you can install to provide clever functionality to better manage tabs, and bookmarks. I didn’t want to install any as: a) I didn’t want to have to spend hours evaluating which may work & b) didn’t want to have to ‘carry’ the overhead of more software that may have unintended effects on my browser.
Thus after some investigation the solution I ended up with is as follows:
- CTRL+SHIFT+D to save all open tabs to a folder in the Bookmark menu (CTRL+SHIFT+O opens the bookmark manager in a seperate window – personally I find this easier to work with).
- Right click on the folder in the Bookmark and select copy. Rather usefully this copies all the URLs stored in the folder as text into the clipboard.
- Paste the URLs in to your text editor of choice (Textpad is a great one). Sort & edit as appropriate. Textpad has the facility to sort and automatically remove duplicates which greatly speeded up editing for me.
- In the bookmark manager create a new folder and use the mouse to drag the URLs from your text editor over the folder. This pastes them into the new folder.
- In your browser shut all the open tabs (right click on a tab and from the dropdown menu select Close Multiple Tabs, Close Other Tabs) apart from a blank new one.
- Back in the bookmark manager right click on the folder containing the list of your newly edited URLs and select Open All in Tabs. Hey presto your tabs should open. Of course depending on how many tabs, logon/security requirements, etc it may take a while to open all of them.
Gubbins... 