Links Like This is a Firefox extension I wrote last year that allows you to automatically open multiple links from a webpage. I released the first version in May of 2007 but never really went back to update or improve it; that’s about to change.

During a recent conversation about Links Like This, I realized how poorly I designed the interface. For example, after right-clicking on a link and selecting “Open Links Like This…”, you used to see this confirmation dialog:

It’s a modal dialog, meaning that you can’t interact with the page until you’ve closed the dialog. The problem with this is that, oftentimes, you can’t see all of the links that have been chosen as “links like this” until the dialog is closed. This problem becomes even more severe when the dialog reads “Open these 143 links?” and you can only see two or three of the highlighted links.

With the latest update, selecting “Open Links Like This…” from the context menu yields this dialog:

It’s not modal, meaning that you can still scroll up and down the webpage when the dialog is visible, but it will stay on top of the webpage until you deal with it. Additionally, selected links are no longer marked with an ugly red border:

Now, they have a pleasant yellow background.

Much better, no? This small upgrade is the first of several I have planned for the next few weeks.

You can install this update at Mozilla Add-ons; if you find Links Like This useful, please consider writing a quick review on the right side of this page. Once a couple of users have given it positive reviews, I can ask Mozilla to make it a public add-on, which would make it available to all users, not just those logged in to Mozilla Add-ons.