Is there a method to export the URLs of the open tabs of a Firefox window?

Question

If I have a Firefox window open that contains 10 tabs, is there a way in Firefox or by a plug-in to get the URLs of those 10 tabs as a text file or some other format?

Right now if I want to do this I need to copy the URL of tab A, paste it somewhere, move to tab B, and repeat. I could also bookmark all the tabs into a folder and export that, but that seems like such a hassle.

If there is no such method, could someone point me to some documents that describe the basics of writing a Firefox plug-in. I am willing to write this myself if there is no "standard" way.

Answer 1

I found an add-on called Send Tab URLs that copies the URLs of all open tabs with the intention of sending them by email to someone. This add-on also allows the target of the URLs to be the clipboard as well as email so this solves my problem 100%.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4437

Answer 2

Go to Tools > Options.

In the General tab look for the Use Current Pages button in the Startup section. When you click on the Use Current Pages button, all the URLs of the pages open in different tabs are copied to the Home Page text box with a pipe delimiter. Copy the text to get all the URLs.

The keyboard shortcut to simulate clicking on the Use Current Pages button is Alt+T+O+C (tested in Firefox 14)

Answer 3

No need to export anything.

Just save all the tabs in a folder (you already know how to do that), right click on folder, copy. Open notepad, paste. Voila. All URL's of bookmarks in that folder.

Answer 4

An open source plugin to do the job: Copy as Markdown. Added benefits: works on both Firefox and Chrome, and it exports with Markdown formatting.

Copy as Markdown for Chrome & Firefox

Do you often type Markdown code manually for a link or image, or even all tabs in a window, and feel tired? Copy as Markdown can help you!

Features

Copy as Markdown is a browser extension helps you copy the following things as Markdown to your system clipboard:

• Current Tab as Link
• A Link in the Page
• An Image in the Page
• An Image that is wrapped with a Link
• All Tabs as a List of Links
• Highlighted Tabs as a List of Links

Excerpt from the project's readme.

It can be added to Firefox from its Add-Ons listing.

Answer 5

#Test in Firefox 5.0
$sessionStoreFile = "$env:APPDATA\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\*.default\sessionstore-backups\recovery.js"
$sessionStoreFileExists = Test-Path $sessionStoreFile
If($sessionStoreFileExists -eq $False) {
    #Test in Firefox 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0
    $sessionStoreFile = "$env:APPDATA\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\*.default\sessionstore.js"
}
(Get-Content -Encoding UTF8 -Raw -Path $sessionStoreFile).Trim('()') | ConvertFrom-Json |
Select -Expand Windows | Select -Expand Tabs | 
Where { !$_.hidden } | ForEach { @($_.Entries)[-1] } | 
Select Url, Title | Export-Csv -Path $CsvFile  -Encoding UTF8  -NoTypeInformation   

You can download detail SQL script from how to export all URLs of Firefox tabs at once(PowerShell)

Answer 6

I'm using Copy Urls Expert. It adds a menu item when I right-click on a tab. There are options to copy all URLs in the current window, in the current tab group, or all tabs; and also to open URLs from the clipboard. The URLs are just separated by newlines. I appreciated the simplicity of this approach, as compared to alternatives like Send Tab URLs which includes the title of each page along with the URL. "Copy Urls Expert" is a rewrite of CopyAllURLs, which is defunct.

Answer 7

Give a try to Export Tabs URLs (Firefox 48+)

It lets you either copy the current opened URLs list (optionally including their title) to clipboard or export it to a timestamped file.

Answer 8

You might want to consider a similar add-on with different options, CopyAllURLs; especially if mailing is not a priority. -Isn't that 2 clicks ? It's in the context menu. [That linked page also lists 'alternative solutions']

Answer 9

From the comment by @Rook:

• Right click on any tab

• Choose "bookmark all tabs"

• Right click on the new folder

• Choose "copy"

Now the URLs are in clipboard.

Answer 10

This is not an addon, but for my own convenience I wrote a bash function if you are not afraid of the command line and if you are using Linux:

getOpenTabs(){
    local profile=$( sed -n -r '/^Path=/,/^Default=1/{ s|^Path=(.*)|\1|p; }' 
        "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini" )
    # https://github.com/avih/dejsonlz4/blob/master/src/dejsonlz4.c
    dejsonlz4 "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox/$profile/sessionstore-backups/recovery.jsonlz4" |
        jq -c '.windows[].tabs[].entries[-1].url' |
        sed 's|^"||; s|"$||;' |
        xclip -selection c
}

On calling this function with getOpenTabs it reads the current session backup from the default profile folder extracts it using dejsonlz4, which you need to install for this function, and saves the links to the clipboard. Packages needed (besides dejsonlz4): jq, sed, xclip

Answer 11

I recommend using https://github.com/balta2ar/brotab for this purpose:

pip install brotab
brotab install

Install the web extension as well: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brotab/

Restart Firefox, and you can pipe brotab list to a file:

brotab list > current-tabs.txt

You can also parse the output with e.g awk:

brotab list | awk -F'\t' '{
    print "Downloading "$2
    system("curl --silent --output \""$2"\" \""$3"\"")
}'

Answer 12

I have used URL Lister for a couple of occasions. It is a simple addon that adds an option in "Tools". It then displays all open tabs' URL's in an editable text area.

It allows to export the list (by copying it to the clipboard) as plain text, HTML anchors or as a bulleted list.

It looks (by visual comparison of the available screenshots) similar to the beforementioned Send Tab URLs, with the differences being the lack of e-mail support and with the existence of the editable text area.

Answer 13

As the second choice you mentioned putting the links into a text file. That method allows you to create documentation for research, and to email the links with titles, and descriptions (or other meta data), creating your own choices of what you want to copy and how you want it formatted. You can use Multiple Tab Handler (Firefox addon). I will just show what I use for copying into email, as I think creating an unordered list of links with buried urls in hypertext would not show up well here. The first two pages did not have descriptions, so I threw in one of my own. If emailing I might manually boldface the titles, and remove the "::" when there is no description.

Tabbed Browsing in Firefox :: Tabbed browsing in Firefox lets you load multiple web pages into separate tabs within the same browser window

Using MTH works well for creating documentation in Evernote, useful if you work on multiple systems or want your notes available anywhere. To help you with some examples of setting up MTH with a variety of choices see http://dmcritchie.mvps.org/firefox/multiple_tab_handler.txt

Answer 14

For Firefox 57 (Quantum), the following Plugin seems to have similiar functionality to "Send Tab URLs" but honestly isnt as clean with the URL and Title:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/copy-as-markdown/

But it works. I hope the author of "Send Tab URLs" updates his plugin as WebExtensions.

Answer 15

The addon in the accepted answer is no longer available since the update to Firefox 57 in 2017.

Fortunately, there are many addons that provide the desired functionality of saving the URLs of open tabs to a text file. For example (in order of first release):

• Save Tab URLs, first released December 6, 2017

  • https://github.com/mnba/save-tabs

• Export Tabs URLs, first released July 1, 2019

  • https://github.com/alct/export-tabs-urls

• Save Tab URLs to Markdown, first released September 11, 2019

  • https://github.com/Lewiscowles1986/save-tabs-as-markdown-ff-chrome-poc

I wanted HTML output and timestamps, so I made my own:

• Save tabs to HTML file

  • https://github.com/nbeaver/save-tabs-as-html

(Disclaimer: I am the author of the last add-on.)

Answer 16

A good way to export all opened tabs from FIREFOX is "CTRL + SHIFT +D" or ALT + B and then Bookmark all tabs and save as folder bookmark in Bookmark Manager --> then export as HTML

Answer 17

Use "Tab Groups" you can export/import all your tabs easily as a bookmarks

Answer 18

CLICK the "ICON" and drag to desktop. (The quickest way :)

Answer 19

follow up to tazo's suggestion:

drag the "icon" (earth or lock or whatever) onto a Word doc. the URL appears at whatever point the cursor was left at.

this isn't a good solution for the original question, as you still have to go to each tab, but at least it's slightly faster than right-clicking in the address bar, copying, and then pasting in a document. it might also be a quick shortcut for those times when you just need to include the URL from a tab with some other text.

note: the first time i tried this, it appeared in the Word doc as different text. the text was a hyperlink, and when i opened to edit the hyperlink, the URL it pointed to was the tab i'd tried to drag over. i don't know where that text came from. my guess is it might have been the last bit of text i'd copied and it was sitting on the clipboard.

note2: this didn't work for Notepad.

note3: CopyAllURLs and URL Lister are not available for version 42.0 (or, as of sometime in 2014). Copy Links seems to still be an option. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/copy-links/