Snap Link Plus: now with checkbox selection
Snap Link Plus is a long standing Firefox add-on that enables you to draw rectangles around links and other content to activate actions.
You can draw a rectangle --using the mouse-- around links for instance to open them all at once in the browser. Very handy as you don't have to click on each link separately to do so.
The process works well on any site: on Google search result pages, on forums, image board, blogs, file hosting sites, torrent sites and any other site where multiple links are provided that you may want to open some or all of.
Snap Link Plus may not offer the same impressive functionality as the -- now pulled Multi Links add-on for Firefox -- but it offers the core functionality that made it great.
Snap Link Plus
Snap Link Plus works by holding down the right mouse button to draw a rectangle around links or other page elements, and letting go of the right mouse button once the rectangle encloses the content.
Links are opened in a new tab automatically, and Snap Links Plus switches to the first page afterwards.
Another option that you have is to hold down the Ctrl-key before you release the right mouse button. This copies the content to the Clipboard of the operating system.
The Alt-key is also used by the extension. Snap Link Plus works only with elements that have the greatest font size. So, if you enclose links with different font sizes, only the largest is selected. This is useful when sites add smaller links, say author, date or category, links close to links so that they are selected automatically when you draw the rectangle around the core links.
You can bypass this by holding down the Alt-key before releasing the mouse button.
A new feature of Snap Link Plus 3.1.04 is the ability to draw rectangles around buttons, checkboxes, and radio buttons.
Buttons are activated when you release the mouse button, checkboxes selected, and the first button of the selected radio buttons is selected.
The checkbox feature can be quite useful. If you are a WordPress administrator for instance, you know that some admin features such as post or comment selection uses checkboxes. Instead of having to select each checkbox individually, you could use Snap Link Plus for that to save time and some sanity.
The one downside is that Snap Link Plus does not offer any options whatsoever. There is no option to open links in a new window, or bookmark them, for instance. The great Multi Links offered more options, such as mapping functions to the middle and left mouse button, or downloading the linked content directly.
Closing Words
Snap Link Plus is a handy browser extension for the Firefox web browser. It offers the core functionality that made Multi Links great, and that should be sufficient for the majority of users. It could use a couple of extra options though.
I currently run Firefox 50 and I installed the older version of Snap Links Plus that I had backed up, precisely because the newer version was problematic. The version I have, which works just fine, is 2.4.3.
No, I will not install Opera. My list of essential Firefox addons is still functioning and alive and kicking and Snap Links is one of them.
A big cheer and thanks to Martin for that post a few months back, about how to bypass the addon signing enforcement in newer Firefoxes.
I’m a fan of this addon but in the recent update the dev started to make it a web-extension compatible. As a result, it is currently incomplete and lacks lots of features that it used to have such as an Options panel. As a temporary solution, I moved to Multi-Links addon.
Similar functions (copy links, open links) can be done with the FireGestures addon (after making some settings).
The FireGestures add-on has this feature built in.
It gives you options to open, copy, or save links when you hover over them with either the Control or Shift key pressed.
The option is under Advanced in the menu under Keypress Gestures. I use the “open hovered links in tabs” options frequently. It loads the links in the same order in which you hover over them.
Snap links plus used to be better like a year ago. It offered options such as where to open tabs (new/current window), whether to switch to first newly created tab, delay after each tab, download, copy links to clipboard, etc. Since they switched to this new web extensions or whatever it is called it became cr.p so I removed it from my addons list. If the older version still works with FireFox it’s worth installing, otherwise it’s very basic in terms of functionality..
You get better (different, but you can achieve the same results) functionality with Opera v12 without any extensions – it’s worth keeping a portable instance of it only for this feature.
Behold, magic:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130606031744/https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-links/