Wikipedia:Linky tutorial

Linky was a powerful add-on to the web browser Mozilla Firefox (only) that let you take full advantage of Firefox's powerful tabs and tabbing features. Linky was especially useful for browsing and editing Wikipedia pages. An available alternative is Link Ninja.(download)

The latest version of Firefox it works with is 43.0.4. To downgrade, see Go back to an old version of Firefox

Unfortunately, Linky stopped working with Firefox version 44 (September 2015). The last update to the code was in 2010. The following information is retained for historical interest, and for users who haven't updated their browsers past version 43.0.4. (Or who have downgraded to that version).

A "tab" is a window opened within a web-browser. Each tab independently displays a web page (such as a Wikipedia article). While the keyboard shortcut Alt+Tab is used to switch between windows, the keyboard shortcuts used to switch between tabs are Ctrl+Tab ↹ and Ctrl+W.

(Ctrl+W closes the current tab as you make the switch).

Linky opens links on pages into tabs in Firefox. Linky can handle 99 links at a time. That is, you can open 99 tabs to display 99 web-pages at a time. Note: There is an updated version of the Linky Plugin available, where you can open up to 499 links at once. See Link section below.

To activate Linky, while in Firefox right-click to get MS Windows' drop-down menu. You'll see Linky on there (if you have it installed).

Linky also works on selections (parts of pages). Simply highlight the section of the page that has the links you want, by holding down the left mouse button and dragging the mouse down the page, let go, right-click, then position the mouse cursor over "Linky", which will drop down Linky's menu, then click on "open selected links in tabs". A box will appear with the list of links with a checkbox next to each link which you can uncheck in the case that there are pages on the list that you don't want to work on.

To take full advantage of Linky, you can create lists of links (such as on user or WikiProject Subpages), as page-processing aids, and then use Linky on those lists. Lists of URLs are especially useful, because Wikipedia URLs can include actions such as "edit" so each link automatically specifies the opening of Wikipedia's edit window - so each page is in edit mode without having to click on "edit this page", thereby eliminating a step to minimize the amount of time you spend waiting for the server. (On tasks dealing with dozens of pages, each click and page load really adds up).