URL Link
Usage
Select some text, in a web-page, text-input (web form) or email, and
right-click.
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If the text looks like a URL, you'll be able to directly open it (or into
a tab) via “Open Selection”.
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If the text doesn't look like a link, you will get a sub-menu
allowing it to be treated as a link anyway, or perform some customisable
conversion first (e.g., add “www.” and “.com”).
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Under preferences, where you can customise the sub-menu that appears, you
can add your own separators with entries consisting solely of hyphens,
for example: "--".
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Custom menu entries may contain any URL, nomatter how long, with the
first '*' being replaced by the selection. You may have a nickname
before a bar '|' in the entry to shorten what appears in the menu:
"Short name|http://www.longname.com/q=*".
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In Firefox, hold down <Shift> when selecting 'Open' to open in a new
window instead of using the current window.
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You may choose whether URL Link places its option near the top or the
bottom of the standard context menu via a preference.
Functionality
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URL Link is a small Firefox and Thunderbird extension that allows you to
select a non-URL in a mail/news message or web-page, and open it in a
browser window.
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For emails, it reconnects links in emails which have been broken across
several lines, and also replaces spaces with the URL character code %20
so that you may follow emailed network `file:' links (which it
auto-detects from Windows X: or UNC network references).
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For web pages, it also allows you to select textual links/URLs in web
pages or edit boxes, and follow them as if they were real links. It will
always let you follow links and also analyses mailto: links.
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It breaks down `mailto:' links (converts, e.g.,
mailto:someone@somesite.com to http://www.somesite.com), so you may visit
a related website.
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It can `follow' javascript: links that would otherwise generate a pop-up
(e.g., http://www.kelkoo.co.uk/ - although they've recently changed some
of their links so that URL Link fails :-( I hope to work on that post
2.0).
Forthcoming changes
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Customisable auto-replacement of text with URLs.
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Maybe allowing some of the customised sub-menu items to be promoted to
the main menu.
Translations
If you would like to help by translating URL Link to your native language,
you can either sign up to Babelzilla and do it automatically,
or email me translated versions of
the data files you'll find on
my website.
Don't include this section of the help file, though!
Contact