sjk wrote on iusethis about WebnoteHappy:

Right now my top request for this app would be an “Open selected items in browser tab” command, with a preference to warn if attempting to open over an N item limit.

Currently, in WebnoteHappy 1.3.1, you can select multiple bookmarks and then open them in your default browser. You can do this by pressing:

  • Enter
  • Return
  • Command-O
  • File > Open In Browser

And you can open up to 10 before it warns you.

But normally it opens the URLs you chose in different windows. 10 new Safari windows is sort of a pain to deal with!

So I dutifully went and experimented with code. I tried several things before realizing… Mac OS X doesn’t really give you a good way to tell a browser to open its URLs in tabs. It does give you a way to tell a URL to open, but it turns out that the browser is in charge of how it behaves. Aha!

So here’s how to make WebnoteHappy open the URLs for the selected bookmarks in tabs in Safari:

  • Choose the menu item “Safari > Preferences…”
  • You will see the “General” settings

    • General settings for Safari - open links from other applications in tabs

  • Look at the bottom and you will see “Open links from applications:” and “in a new window” will be chosen.
  • Choose “in a new tab in the current window”.

    • Safari "Open links from applications" set to open links from other applications in tabs

  • Now WebnoteHappy will open the bookmarks you select in tabs instead of windows. 10 new tabs is much better than 10 new windows.
  • Note that this will work for all other apps that open URLs, like NetNewsWire, iChat, Mail.app, etc.

Enjoy your tabs! I’ll post instructions for the other Mac web browsers later.