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Copying Data About Browser Tab Content, One Tab at a Time

I have recently considered writing another entry here in which I would list Greasemonkey user scripts that are useful for a certain purpose. And when I search Userscripts.org for scripts to write about, I ensure that I am able to provide links to the pages on Userscripts.org on which these scripts can be found. So when I find these scripts, I copy and paste the URLs where they are located to a text file where I keep this information. However, the URLs that Userscripts.org assigns to each script’s page do not contain information about the scripts located at these URLs. Therefore, I need to manually enter information about each of these URLs that I copy and paste. Just as the permalinks of blog posts do not always contain the titles of entries, but instead, the order in which these entries were posted, one cannot tell which script is located at a URL by checking the URL. If there were a way to quickly copy the title of a page with its URL, that certainly would be useful to me when I remind myself why I copy and paste these URLs that I copy and paste.

It was about ten blog posts ago that I mentioned the Firefox extension with the title of Copy All Urls here. This extension is quite useful for copying the URLs in each browser tab to the clipboard with information associated with these URLs. One such piece of information copied to the clipboard with each URL is the title of the page, which is good to have in the situation that I previously described. However, there are times that I would prefer to only copy information on the contents of the currently selected tab. I thought that if there were some sort of modification that could be made to the extension to give the option for copying information only on what is in the currently selected tab to the clipboard, then the extension would be even more useful. So I checked to see if there were modifications that I could make to this extension so that this functionality for copying data on only the contents of the currently selected tab could be added to it. And I was quite pleased to see that with only a few modifications to the extension’s code, I was able to add this feature to the extension.

Although I have modified the code so that this feature would be available to me, I am not sure if a Firefox extension with this feature might be available soon. I have contacted Jürgen Plasser, the author of the extension, about including this functionality in the extension. He recently mentioned here that a new version of it will be available soon. And according to this page about the extension, he is open to feedback on features that can be added to it. However, adding this feature would make the extension’s name something of a misnomer. Still, I would consider addition of this feature useful, and so he might be willing to release it with a new name. In any case, I will try to ensure that ability to copy data on only the selected tab will be available to all those who might want that ability. No such extension is available now, as I found when I looked for extensions that copy data on tabs to the clipboard. In looking for extensions similar to Copy All Urls, I did find extensions that I considered interesting. So I copied and pasted the URLs where they were located to an e-mail that I sent to myself, so I could take time to install these extensions later. However, since the URLs of pages for extensions at addons.mozilla.org do not contain the names of extensions located at these URLs, I was once again reminded why an extension with this feature should be made available.