With Multi Links it just takes a matter of seconds to do so. Without, you’d be clicking a lot and wasting precious time doing so.

Selection Links is a new Firefox add-on that does away with the “draw rectangle around links” feature which is the biggest difference to the Multi Links add-on. If you have used Multi Links or a comparable solution before you know that it can be configured to open the links automatically once you release the mouse button drawing the rectangle on the website.

Selection Links uses a different technology. You select the part of the website containing the links with the left mouse button, right-click the selection afterwards and pick either Selection Open or Selection Download from the context menu. Depending on the selection the link targets are either opened in new tabs in the browser or added to Firefox’s download manager.

The extension comes with options to change the default behavior. You can change the link target to new windows or new tabs (instead of new active tabs which is the default value). The remaining options detail which links will be included by the add-on on selection. The extension by default fetches anchor and text links. Duplicate links are by default ignored.

Selection Links is not as comfortable as Multi Links in many regards. It is still a helpful extension and less complex to use. It can be a solid alternative if you open multiple link targets less frequently. Firefox users can install the add-on from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository. (via)

Recently I discovered that Multi Links offers a lot more than just opening multiple links in the web browser (see the review of the Copy Links add-on for pointers).This guide is about those features, and how you can turn the extension into a link handline powerhouse. Lets start with the basics and go from there.

Multi-Links is compatible with all versions of Firefox. Firefox Aurora and Nightly users need to force compatibility, for instance with the Add-on Compatibility Reporter.

You can open multiple links in Firefox by holding down the right mouse button and drawing a rectangle on the screen. All links inside the rectangle will be opened automatically. The extension handles links on search results page differently, as it only selects the core links pointing to websites instead of all links on a result’s page. This, plus many other features, are configurable in the options.

Multi Links support various link related actions, they are:

• Open in new tabs – this opens all selected links in new tabs in the browser. It is optionally possible to switch to a new tab automatically.
• Open in new windows – Similar to open in new tabs, only that new windows are opened. Again with an option to switch to a newly opened window.
• Open as tabs in new window – Combines the two options above. Only one new window will be opened and all selected links are displayed as tabs in that window.
• Copy to clipboard – options to copy information to the Clipboard. Available are urls with titles, urls only, titles only and HTML links.
• Add to bookmarks – Adds all selected links to the bookmarks.
• Download links – Downloads all links, or more specifically their contents to the local PC.

These actions can be defined for the left, middle and right mouse button. One problem that users may encounter is that configuring an action may interfere with the button’s standard functionality.

I therefor recommend to add a key for multiple selections under the General tab.

You only get the multi-link functionality if you press that key. This resolves compatibility issues if you configure the actions without extra key.

You have three buttons that you can configure. I suggest to keep the right mouse button functionality, and not change it if you prefer to open those links in a new window instead.

This leaves options for the middle and left mouse button. One interesting option is to use one of the buttons to copy link information to the clipboard. Helpful if you want to copy multiple links at once to the clipboard, or if you need to copy and paste both the url and title of one or multiple links. This has improved my blogging workflow as I can now copy both title and url in one go.

I have only configured left and right mouse buttons, and not the middle mouse button. It is up to you to if you find that sufficient, or would like to have the bookmarking or downloading option mapped to a button as well.

The appearance of the rectangle and highlighting of links can be configured under Appearance. The appearance options can be configured individually for each mouse button. I do not think that’s really necessary but some users may prefer the visual distinction.

You lastly might want to take a look at the advanced tab. Here it is possible to configure the extension to always copy link information to the clipboard, regardless of the actions selected. This may be handy for users who want to use one button to perform an action and the copying.

The extension places a button in the status bar. This is not really necessary, unless you want to use it to turn the extension on or off with a click or open the options regularly.

Multi Links is an indispensable add-on that saves me minutes of work every day.

Similar extensions are available for Opera in the form of Snap Links and Linky for the Chrome browser.

Chrome’s Download Selection is a similar extension. It offers a better selection process, giving up some of the one click comfort of Multi Links in the process.

Instead of drawing a rectangle around the items it turns the web page into a darker tone which indicates selection modus. Here the Chrome users can draw rectangles across elements to open them all at once.

The main difference is that it is possible to draw multiple rectangles on screen, The extension will automatically highlight the items that have been selected so far.

Pressing Enter on the computer keyboard will open all selected items in new browser tabs. Very helpful to display all images that are shown on a screen, download multiple files at once or open several links in new tabs after they have been selected.

download selection

Holding down the ALT key while selecting items removes them from the list of elements that are opened when the Enter key is pressed. This is useful if elements have been highlighted by error or if some items in between should not be opened.

Download Selection works with links and media elements. It sometimes has problems recognizing items on the page and does not seem to work on https websites or sites that use frames.

Chrome users can download the latest version of the extension directly from the Google Chrome Extension repository. Those who prefer something similar to Multi Links instead can take a closer look at Linky.

The extension is very useful for users who often have to open multiple links on websites, like opening all new threads in a web forum or new popular links on sites like Delicious or Digg.

Snap Links Lite is a port of the Firefox extension for the Google Chrome web browser. It is not as customizable but offers the core feature of drawing a rectangle on the screen to open the links in tabs in the web browser.

Only the right mouse button can be used to draw the rectangle and links will always be opened in new tabs in the same web browser window. Snap Links Lite will also open all links in the rectangle unlike the Firefox original which can for instance block all but the target urls in search engines.

Snap Links Lite can be downloaded from the Google Chrome Extension gallery.

An alternative to Snap Links Lite is Linky for Google Chrome which works different as it opens all links that are currently highlighted in the browser. (via Lifehacker)

Linky is the first add-on for the Google Chrome browser that brings part of that functionality to the browser. The Google Chrome extension does not work exactly like the Firefox add-on which becomes problematic in several occasions.

Linky places an icon in the Google Chrome header. Pressing that icon will open all links that are currently highlighted by the user. Multi Links users will know that highlighting does not prove to be as effective as working with the rectangle simple because of the reason that highlighting will highlight everything on the page between the first and last selected link. This would mean for the Google Search results for example that all Cached and Similar pages would be opened as well which is usually not the intention of the user.

Linky works best when the links are placed next to each other without interfering elements. This is for example the case in sidebar menus. It is however not practical on all sites and the developer should consider switching to the implementation offered by Multi Links instead.

Linky can be downloaded at the official Google Chrome extensions repository over at the Google website.

That’s were the new add-on Multi Links comes into play. The add-on offers the same functionality as Snap Links with the difference that it is compatible with the latest version of Firefox without having to force compatibility. Some users reported that Multi Links processes links better than Snap Links.

Links can be selected by right-clicking and drawing a rectangle around them. It is possible to cancel the operation with the left mouse button or pressing Esc. One interesting option is the ability to only open some of the links on the page by pressing the CTRL or Shift key to draw smaller rectangles around links.

Options are available the add-on options of the web browser that cover those of Snap Links.

• You can choose to open links in new tabs or new windows.
• You can choose whether to go to those new tabs/windows or stay on the current tab/window when they open.
• You can choose to copy to clipboard or to bookmark selected links.
• You can choose a selection and link box colour from the preset colours or in put your own hexadecimal colour code.
• You can choose the thickness of the link nd selection box borders.
• You can choose the line style of the box border to be solid, dotted or dashed.
• Smart selection is for search engines. It helps you by only selecting search listing results rather than including other links such as “similar”, “cached” or “filter” as well as other links that the search engines display.

Multi Links works perfectly and has replaced Snap Links Plus on my computer systems.