tech.einaregilsson.com

A place for my programming projects and the occasional blog about technology related matters.

Highlander

Source code - addons.mozilla.org page - Version history

This was done as a request for someone, I can’t find the thread anymore. Then later another extension developer, Malte Kraus, pretty much rewrote the thing from scratch (version 1.0) and sent me his changes. I fixed some more things and added some more features for 1.1 so now it’s about 50 % mine, 50 % his :).

What this extension does: when you click a link to an url that’s already open in another tab then you’ll switch to that tab instead of actually opening the link. In the latest version this should also work for ctrl+click, javascript opening urls and pretty much anything. Version 1.1 adds the ability to whitelist certain urls, using wildcard patterns, and the ability to disable Highlander completely. Version 1.1.1 adds the option to ignore #bookmark signs in urls so index.html#foo and index.html#bar are considered the same thing. See version notes for more info.

Works with: Firefox: 2.0b1 – 3.0a3
Latest version: 1.1.3

Download

Reader's Comments

ken meece | August 25th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
thanks for the whitelist feature. GREAT!

may i suggest one little enhancement/tweak for a future version? i’d like to use an icon in the status bar to turn on-off and add the current site to the whitelist.

great extension!
ken
ken meece | August 26th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
bug?

go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/mostemailed/index.html

middle click any article.

(i use middle click to load a link into a new, background tab…. that may be a TMP option, or a ff option - i don’t recall)

nothing happens

disable Highlander, then

middle-click again — it works (load article in background tab)

enable Highlander, but whilelist “www.washingtonpost.com*”

middle-click article — it doesn’t work again, the article isn’t loaded — ie, the whitelist makes no difference, doesn’t seem to disable Highlander

so, when highlander is enabled, regardless of any whitelisting, the middle click is disabled in all cases. (this is true on other sites as well)

this appears to be a bug, an unwanted behavior
einar | August 27th, 2007 at 8:07 am
Hmmm. I have a laptop and just use the touchpad, I don’t even own a mouse so I can’t really test it until I get a mouse. Could you try something for me?

1. Goto about:config and change the extensions.highlander.debug setting to true.
2. Goto the site you mentioned.
3. Goto Tools - Error Console. Clear all the messages.
4. Now try middleclicking an article. You should see some debug output in the Error console.
5. Post it here

If you could do that it would be great. Otherwise I’ll try to check this out sometime when I have access to a normal mouse.
wrongwrider | August 30th, 2007 at 11:52 am
In der Deutschen Version wird folgender Fehler angezeigt:

——–^
einar | August 31st, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Hi

If I understand you correctly you just said ‘In the German version the following error is indicated’. But I don’t see any error message. Did it include > or < ? If so it might have been cut out by the blog system. You can also send it to me directly at highlander@einaregilsson.com
Peuj | September 6th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
Hi,

Really great extension!! Thanks

@ken meece: I’ve tested on the web site as I use the middleclick but I don’t reproduce your problem.
Chris Bloom | September 7th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
Great extension! I saw it in the add-ons directory and thought, why would I ever need that? Two days later I found myself thinking “Boy I wish I had that with extension now all these tabs open” Is there a posibility of adding in the option of ignoring inline bookmarks in URLs? i.e. So that http://somesite.com#section_2 is considered the same as http://somesite.com#section_5?
einar | September 7th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
Yeah, that definitely sounds like a feature that should be there. I’ll put it in the next version.
einar | September 9th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
Chris, I’ve added the functionality in version 1.1.1 that is available now on this site, and soon on AMO. You’ll have to turn it on specifically though, by going to about:config and setting extensions.highlander.ignoreHash to true. Enjoy
Speravir | September 10th, 2007 at 10:34 am
In addition to “wrongwrider”:
In German version of FFx appears after installation of “Highlander” below the status bar following error message:

——–^

According to http://www.firefox-browser.de/forum/viewtopic.php?p=392218#392218 the reason is, that you deleted the german locale (which came from Dr. Evil, didn’t it?), but have forgotten to delete the corresponding entry in “chrome.manifest”.
And I must say, that’s right: I changed this manually, and now Highlander works fine.
Speravir | September 10th, 2007 at 10:37 am
Oh, there’s the problem …

Let’s try it again with escaping the angles - the error message is:

<menu id=”menu_Highlander” label=”&HighlanderMenuItem. label;” accesskey=”HighlanderMenuItem. accesskey;”>
——–^
einar | September 10th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
Aha, ok, now I understand. Thanks for letting me know, I’ll try to rip that out soon and post a new version. Unless someone wants to translate the rest of it to german…
einar | September 11th, 2007 at 10:58 am
I’ve put up version 1.1.2 which completely removes all traces of german locale so there should be no errors. Still waiting on volunteers to do a proper translation however…
neihrick | September 12th, 2007 at 7:01 pm
Hi, i like the idea of this extension. For some reason, it doesn’t seem to work. after installing then restarting firefox, i opened http://xbox360.ign.com/, then opened another tab and went to http://pc.ign.com/. I clicked the link to direct me to http://xbox360.ign.com/ and it opened that page. Now i have 2 tabs with URL = http://xbox360.ign.com/. it does this for other sites as well, am i doing something wrong?
einar | September 12th, 2007 at 7:26 pm
Hi neihrick

I tried those two sites and it worked for me. Doesn’t it work at all for you?
Here are a couple of things you can try:

1. Goto about:config and set extensions.highlander.debug to true. Then you can look at the error console under the tools menu and should see a lot of output from Highlander, some of it might explain why this isn’t working.
2. Do you have the latest version, 1.1.2 ?
3. Do you have a german version of Firefox? There have been some problems with the german localization but I thought they were fixed now.

Let me know how it goes
neihrick | September 13th, 2007 at 1:58 am
Hi, thanks for the quick response.
No, it doesn’t work at all for me.
Using 1.1.2, not using german version.
I turned debug on but saw nothing in the error console pertaining to Highlander other than “Highlander: Initializing…” I restarted Firefox with debug on and tried clicking on links with URLs being the same as open tabs and I dont see anything in the Error Console. I am going to try the older versions.
neihrick | September 13th, 2007 at 3:38 am
i created a new ff profile with only Highlander installed and it works. got all my previous add ons installed and still working so not sure what the problem was. thanks
cubefox | September 14th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
I have a feature request:

could you provide an option (about:config is enough) that tells highlander _not_ to switch to the tab which’s duplicate just was getting blocked by highlander? this would be very useful.

I hope you know what I mean.
thanks
einar | September 15th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Hi

So you want nothing at all to happen? You just press a link, it doesn’t take you there but it also doesn’t switch to another tab that has the url open? That sounds like a usability nightmare I don’t think I’ll add it as a feature, but if you’re comfortable with some hacking of your own, you can go into

%your profile folder%\extensions\highlander@einaregilsson.com\chrome\content and edit the highlander.js

Find this code:
```
selectTab: function(tab) {
    var win = tab.ownerDocument.defaultView;
    // focus tab and containing window
    win.getBrowser().selectedTab = tab;
    if(win != window)
      win.focus();
  },
```
and change it to:
```
selectTab: function(tab) {
   return; //NEVER SELECT THE TAB
    var win = tab.ownerDocument.defaultView;
    // focus tab and containing window
    win.getBrowser().selectedTab = tab;
    if(win != window)
      win.focus();
  },
```
That way you should never switch to the tab you found. If you’re not comfortable hacking the extension you can mail me and I’ll send you a custom build, but these changes won’t go into the released version, sorry.
cubefox | September 15th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
thank you, I will test the code later (at home).

my requestet feature is not completly useless, even though it seems so.
when your are opening some/many tabs in backround, you don’t want to switch to another.

perhaps you can implement a feature that highlander only doesn’t switch tab when you open a tab in backround?
einar | September 18th, 2007 at 10:59 am
Ah, yes, now I understand. Of course, if you’re trying to open in a background tab of course you don’t want to immediately switch to it, makes perfect sense. I’ll see what I can do for the next version. It’ll probably be a few weeks until I publish it though, because I’m very busy with school at the moment.
einar | September 21st, 2007 at 7:36 pm
Sorry cubefox, your feature didn’t make it into 1.1.3 that was just released but I’ll keep it in mind for 1.2.
cubefox | September 21st, 2007 at 11:10 pm
okay, thank you.
ken meece | September 30th, 2007 at 5:25 am
highlander has simply stopped working for me. i see the solution below, and someday when a have a whole lotta time i might try it. but in the meantime there seems to be an extension clash, or an odd preference by hilander to be loaded before (some particular?) other extension(s). i’m hoping that a fix for this can be found before i have to try to sort out the incompatibilities and/or sequencing myself.

# neihrick | September 13th, 2007 at 3:38 am

i created a new ff profile with only Highlander installed and it works. got all my previous add ons installed and still working so not sure what the problem was. thanks
einar | September 30th, 2007 at 10:56 am
If the problem was fixed for Neihrick by installing Highlander first and then all other extension then it’s probably something about the order in which the extensions load, Highlander seems to need to be loaded first or something like that. Or maybe it needs to be the last one to load. I’ll try to look into how extensions load in Firefox, if it’s always in the same order as they were installed or what. Maybe I can hack up some solution where I delay the loading a bit or something.
Reporter | October 3rd, 2007 at 6:15 pm
Would you mind adding the following options:
- (don’t) switch tab if you type the URL (on the address bar)

The reason why I want it because I need to open the same URL in different tabs once in a while, eg when you do a search, when you want to compare pages etc. The whitelist is a bit less convenient (it doesn’t support wildcards) but the real issue is I don’t want to whitelist the site (eg when I compare pages, I may do it nearly everywhere. “Adding into whitelist -> Compare pages -> Remove it from whitelist”… this is very clumsy and inconvenient).

I need it very much. Plese consider adding it. Thanks for your reading.

PS: You may consider adding more options (eg don’t switch open new tab/window via context menu, or middle-click the link, and so on) but the first one is what I want.
Reporter | October 3rd, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Forget to mention. Your extension is very useful to me (although it creates some annoyances due to my own browsing habits). Thank you so much for your time to create a great addon to the community.
einar | October 3rd, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Hi Reporter, glad you find the extension useful. I probably won’t update in a while since I have a lot to do at work and in university but I’ll consider it when I do the next release.

Probably the easiest way for you to bypass this is to disable highlander temporarily when you need to open two tabs. You can do that by going to Tools -> Highlander and turning off the “Enabled” item. It’s a bit of a hassle but still easier than using the whitelist.
Reporter | October 4th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
Thanks for your idea. The reason why I choose the “temporary whitelist” approach is because I want the functions to be on while I can still type he site URL without redirection.

Wish you getting first-honour when you graduate.
…… and please don’t forget my requests
neihrick | October 10th, 2007 at 5:30 am
is there a way to add support for Chrome://*.xul?
einar | October 10th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
hmm, there might be. I would have thought that it would work automatically, since it’s just a different string as the address. I’ll look into it for the next release, but it’ll be a while.
Anonymous | October 15th, 2007 at 5:45 am
I agree that an icon to toggle it on/off would be very helpful
Peuj | January 9th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Hi,

I know it can sound as a stupid situation but Highlander doesn’t work if the duplicated window is the same than the active one.
For example if I’m in the web page http://tech.einaregilsson.com/projects/highlander/ and there is a link to http://tech.einaregilsson.com/projects/highlander/ if I click on this link then it opens a duplicated web page.

Thanks

Highlander

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