Firefox: Open Multiple Websites With One Click

This is a small tutorial which I wrote by putting together some tips from Mozilla’s knowledge base. It takes only a couple of minutes and saves a lot of your valuable time.

Suppose you have 5-6 or more websites that you visit when you fire up your browser. What you’d normally do is that you would open a new tab manually for each site, then type in the address/select from your bookmarks. Pretty tedious, eh? In this tutorial, we’ll see how we can get Firefox to do the boring stuff for you. All you need to do is tweak a few settings, after which you can open tabs for all your must-visit-daily websites with ONE click. Sounds good? Let’s get our hands dirty, then.

  • Run Firefox, then go to Tools->Options. Note down the address in the home page field, in case you want to restore it later.

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  • Now all we need to do is type in the addresses of the sites you need to open in one go. Do it this way:

http://www.gmail.com|http://www.chelseafc.com|http://www.abhi247.com

  • All the addresses need to be separated using the pipe symbol – |. So now that you’ve put the addresses in the home page field, your settings should look something like this:

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  • Save the changes by clicking OK, then close the browser.
  • When you restart Firefox, it will open up a tab for each address that you typed in the home page field, if you have set Firefox to open your homepage on startup. That is not what we want, so we’ll make a few more changes.
  • Once again, open up the Options window and set Firefox to open a blank page when it starts.

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  • Click OK to close the Options dialog.
  • Now we come to the one-click part. Right-click on the Menu bar or any of the buttons. Select Customize from the popup menu.

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  • Drag and drop the Home button onto the toolbar.

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  • Your toolbar should now look something like this:

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  • That’s it! Close the Customize window and try clicking on the Home button on your toolbar.

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  • There you have it. Every single address opened in a new tab. And all you had to do was click the Home button.
  • This way, Firefox won’t run off to fetch all those webpages every time it starts and you can open all your favourite websites with one click!
    That brings us to the end of this little tutorial. Hopefully this would be useful to a lot of people.

So what has changed?

Alright, I said I would list out the changes and why they were made. So here they are, in a neat list:

  • The site is no longer ‘just a blog’. I wanted to make it a platform for all my future endeavours. The scope for expansion through a blog is limited, in my opinion.
  • There are 3 additional sections now, namely Art, Digital Art and Photography. Earlier I used to publish all of my creations in posts under a category. But this time I decided that it would be better to allocate a separate page where I can showcase them. It could have been possible through WordPress, but I decided against it.
  • The site is no longer based entirely on WordPress. I wanted to design something that had my unique imprint on it. Designing a WordPress theme was too cumbersome and hardly left a lot of room for experimentation.
  • The blog now uses a custom theme, matching perfectly with the look of the rest of the site. That was probably the second most difficult part.
  • The most difficult part was deciding on the layout, colours and such. I borrowed ideas and resources from other websites that I had seen and admired, tweaked them, added lots of my own inputs and conjured up something that looks like this.

And most importantly, now I can call this site another one of my own creations. It’s an altogether different feeling to make something from scratch and then watch it running flawlessly (almost). :D

And before I forget, I’ve also lost most of the links in my blogroll so if any of you were on my list, do tell me so I can add you back! And if you were not on my list earlier, you can be now! :)

Oh, and another thing. The site is still in BETA, so if you spot any odd behaviour or if something looks out of place, do notify me through the comments or through e-mail.

Cheers! :)