Send Tab URLs discontinued

Now that Firefox ESR version 60 has been released, and Firefox ESR 52.x will reach end-of-life status very soon, Send Tab URLs is officially discontinued.

Send Tab URLs relies on a lot of functionality that is not possible with WebExtensions. For example, it is no longer possible to get the default email client that is set in Windows. With that, it was decided that rewriting Send Tab URLs into a WebExtension is not feasible.

For users looking for an alternative, consider FoxyTab by erosman. Among many things you can do with this add-on, you can copy a list of URLs for all your browser tabs, or just the ones to the left or the right of the current tab. You can also choose to copy just the URLs of the browser tabs only, or both the page titles and URLs. You can then paste the list into the editor window of your email program, and format it as desired.

The Send Tab URLs page on the AE Creations website will be taken down soon, but the Send Tab URLs discussion category in the Help and Support forums will continue to be available.

Compatibility with Firefox 57

Many users have been wondering about plans to make the AE Creations extensions compatible with Firefox 57, which is scheduled for release in November 2017, and is expected to remove all support for legacy extensions.  Clippings, Panic Button and Send Tab URLs are all legacy extensions, and would need to be completely rewritten as WebExtensions to be compatible with Firefox 57 and future releases of Firefox afterwards.

After spending the last few months studying developer documentation, developing prototypes and understanding the capabilities and limitations of WebExtensions, I have enough information to announce plans for compatibility with Firefox 57.

Clippings

Clippings will be completely rewritten as a WebExtension.  The legacy extension will continue to be supported for Thunderbird, which is not switching over to WebExtensions at this time.

Clippings will be subjected to the limitations of WebExtensions, in that many existing features will no longer be available.  Examples are color-coded labels on clippings, ability to choose data source location, backing up and restoring the data source, and exporting clippings to HTML.

For current users of Clippings, there will be a migration step that everyone will have to perform when upgrading to the WebExtension-compatible version of Clippings.  A final legacy version of Clippings will be released in advance of Firefox 57 to make it possible to perform this migration; more information on this is coming soon.


Panic Button

Panic Button will be completely rewritten as a WebExtension.  Like Clippings, it will be subjected to the limitations of WebExtensions; as a result, some features in Panic Button 3.x will no longer be available in the WebExtension-compatible version of Panic Button. Examples include the "Hide All Windows" action, custom toolbar button icons (but the 20 predefined toolbar button icons will still be available to choose from), and changing the shortcut key for invoking the Panic Button action.


Send Tab URLs

Send Tab URLs is the least-used extension from AE Creations, with 5,786 average daily users between July 2016 and July 2017, compared to 8,354 for Panic Button and 35,962 for Clippings.  I've decided to discontinue development of Send Tab URLs, and focus on Clippings and Panic Button.

Send Tab URLs 2.3.1 released!

A minor release of Send Tab URLs is now available from Mozilla Add-ons and the AE Creations website.

If you already have Send Tab URLs installed, it will be upgraded for you if automatic extension updates are enabled. Otherwise, open Extension Manager (Tools → Add-ons), then right-click on the entry for Send Tab URLs in the list of installed extensions and choose Find Updates.

What's New

• Automatically use the correct line break character in the URL list, based on operating system

Help and Support

Questions and comments about Clippings should be directed to the AE Creations Help and Support forums, hosted on Google Groups.

Send Tab URLs 2.3 released!

A new version of Send Tab URLs is now available from Mozilla Add-ons and the AE Creations website.

If you already have Send Tab URLs installed, it will be upgraded for you if automatic extension updates are enabled. Otherwise, open Extension Manager (Tools → Add-ons), then right-click on the entry for Send Tab URLs in the list of installed extensions and choose Find Updates.

What's New

• Compatible with multi-process tabs (a.k.a. Electrolysis or e10s)
• Other minor fixes

Help and Support

Questions and comments about Send Tab URLs should be directed to the AE Creations Help and Support forums, hosted on Google Groups.

Compatibility of AE Creations extensions with Firefox nightly builds and Firefox Developer Edition

There are upcoming new features and underlying changes to Firefox which will cause the AE Creations extensions to stop working.  If you are using the stable release of Firefox (version 42 at the time of this writing), then this won't impact you.  However, if you are using Firefox Developer Edition (formerly known as Aurora) or Firefox Beta, then you need to be aware of a few things.

Multi-process Tabs

In a nutshell, this new feature, sometimes referred to as Electrolysis or e10s, runs the web page content and the browser chrome code in separate processes.

Clippings, Panic Button, Send Tab URLs and Delicious Post will all break.  If you want to run these extensions in Firefox Beta or Firefox Developer Edition, turn off multi-process tabs. You can do this in the browser preferences page.  These extensions will be updated over the next few months to support Electrolysis, so stay tuned.

Clippings users on Thunderbird should not be impacted by this change.

JavaScript Compatibility with ECMAScript 6 (ES6)

There are changes to Firefox to make its JavaScript engine compliant with the new ES6 standard, but will cause extensions to fail unless they are updated.  Some of the code in Clippings required updating, and this was completed during development of the upcoming 5.0 release.  No updates were needed for the other AE Creations extensions.

Some users have reported that Clippings has stopped working on Firefox 44 alpha (the current Firefox Developer Edition version) because of the ES6 compatibility change that was introduced in this Firefox release.  To work around this issue, install the latest beta release of Clippings 5.0.

Send Tab URLs 2.2 released!

A new release of Send Tab URLs is now available from Mozilla Add-ons and the AE Creations website.

If you already have an older version of Send Tab URLs installed, it will be upgraded for you if automatic extension updates are enabled. Otherwise, open Extension Manager (Tools → Add-ons), then right-click on the entry for Send Tab URLs in the list of installed extensions and choose Find Update.

What's New

• Integration with the new Firefox Australis user interface
• Support for Google Apps Gmail. This was previously an experimental feature; it is now turned on by default
• Bug fix: Tab titles display as "null" in the URL list if Send Tab URLs was invoked after the browser session was restored (issue #1)

 
Things You Should Know About

As of version 2.2, the following email clients are no longer supported (but may still work): Mozilla Suite, Eudora, Outlook Express, Windows Mail.

Help and Support

Questions and comments about Send Tab URLs should be directed to the AE Creations forums, now hosted on Google Groups. 

Send Tab URLs 2.1.1 released!

Send Tab URLs 2.1.1 has been released and is available for download from the AE Creations website.

If you already have an older version of Send Tab URLs installed, you will need to uninstall it first, then go to the download link above and download the new version from there.

What's New

• Compatible with Firefox 20
• Automatically reload any unloaded browser tabs before sending their URLs, due to browser tab load optimizations that were introduced in Firefox 20. The auto reload is necessary to retrieve the browser tab titles for the URL list
• Updated localizations, and added support for Simplified Chinese

Help and Support

Questions and comments about Send Tab URLs should be directed to the AE Creations forums, now hosted on Google Groups.  

Send Tab URLs: Send to Gmail feature doesn't work with new Gmail message composer

Update 17 February 2013: The problem described in this post appears to have been resolved.

Google has recently rolled out a new, redesigned message compose user interface, which breaks Send Tab URLs when selecting the option to send the list of browser tab URLs to Gmail.  After logging in to Gmail, users are stuck at the screen showing the progress for loading the inbox.

To workaround this problem, switch back to the old message compose UI.  This Gmail Help article describes how to do it.

I am holding off on a "proper" fix for this bug until I have a better sense of where Google is going with this new feature.

Send Tab URLs 2.1 released!

Send Tab URLs 2.0 was released in 2008. Since then, Firefox 4 came out, which dramatically altered the browser UI for users on Windows Vista or Windows 7 by replacing the menu bar with a Firefox application menu (though it can be enabled if users could find the setting to do that). A new release was needed to improve usability for affected users -- and it's finally here!

Version 2.1 is now available on Mozilla Add-ons and the AE Creations website. Current users should receive an update if automatic extension updates are enabled.

What's New

• New option to add the Send Tab URLs command to the List All Tabs menu (usually located on the far right of the tab strip in Firefox 4 and newer); option is enabled by default
  
• Removed experimental support for Yahoo! Mail
• Added translations for German, Hebrew and Swedish. Thanks to the translators at Babelzilla for their contributions!
  

Help and Support

Questions and comments about Clippings should be directed to the AE Creations forums.

Has anyone used Send Tab URLs with Google Apps Gmail?

Send Tab URLs has had experimental support for Google Apps Gmail since version 2.0 (regular Gmail has been supported out of the box). Since I do not have access to any Google Apps environment, I haven't been able to test it, and so the UI for Google Apps support was not enabled by default. A past blog post describes how to enable Google Apps Gmail support.

Has anyone tried using Send Tab URLs with Google Apps Gmail? I would like to hear from those users who have. I'm interested in learning whether Send Tab URLs works with it -- and what, if any, issues were encountered. If there are many users that have enabled Google Apps support, I would consider exposing the user interface for Google Apps support in an upcoming release of Send Tab URLs.

Your feedback on experimental support for Google Apps Gmail in Send Tab URLs is most welcome. Please leave comments below. Also, please indicate if you would be willing to assist in testing. Thanks in advance.

Using Google Apps and Yahoo! Mail in Send Tab URLs 2.0

Send Tab URLs 2.0 comes with experimental support for Yahoo! Mail Classic (not the so-called "all-new" Yahoo! Mail) and Google Apps Gmail (hereafter referred to as Google Apps, and not to be confused with regular Gmail, which already works out of the box). Support for those two web mail apps is disabled by default, but can be enabled if you wish to try it.

Why?

Send Tab URLs has not been tested with Google Apps, as I have not been able to gain access to any Google Apps installations to use for testing. If Send Tab URLs can't be tested with Google Apps, then there is no assurance that it will work with it.

As for Yahoo! Mail, the problem of not being able to use a quick compose URL in the so-called "all-new" Yahoo! Mail precludes support for that web mail app. And the setup required to make Send Tab URLs work with classic Yahoo! Mail would be too difficult for "normal" computer users to bother with.

Nonetheless, testers and advanced users are welcome to try using Send Tab URLs with these two unsupported web mail applications. If that is you, then do so at your own risk.

To Enable Support for Yahoo! Mail (Classic)

1. Start Firefox. Then in about:config, set the pref sendtabs.mailclient.yahoomail.enabled to true.
2. Open a new browser window or tab and login to your Yahoo! Mail account.
3. Once you are viewing your Yahoo! Mail inbox, observe the URL in the Firefox address bar. Select and copy the URL up to, and including, the last slash character (/) in the URL. Be sure to include the "http://" prefix.
   
4. Return to about:config and edit the pref sendtabs.mailclient.yahoomail.mail_url, changing its value to what you selected and copied in step 3.

After following these steps, you should be able to use Send Tab URLs with Yahoo! Mail Classic.

To Enable Support for Google Apps

1. Start Firefox. Then in about:config, set the pref sendtabs.mailclient.googleapps.enabled to true.
2. The first time you send the URL list to Google Apps, you will be prompted for the Google Apps domain. Consult your system administrator if you do not know this information. You can change it later from the extension preferences dialog (from a Firefox browser window, choose Tools -> Add-ons, select Send Tab URLs and click Options -> Google Apps tab).
   

Things You Should Know About

The URL list generated by Send Tab URLs won't display properly when the Yahoo! Mail editor is in rich text mode. However, you can switch from plain text to rich text in Yahoo! Mail's editor to compose and send the URL list as an HTML email.

Send Tab URLs 2.0 released!

Send Tab URLs 2.0 has been released and is available for download from Mozilla Add-ons and the AE Creations web site.

If you already have an older version of Send Tab URLs installed, it will be upgraded for you if automatic extension updates are enabled. Otherwise, open Extension Manager (Tools → Add-ons), then right-click on the entry for Send Tab URLs in the list of installed extensions and choose Find Update.

Supported languages: English (United States), Chinese (simplified), Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portugeuse (Brazil), Spanish, Turkish.

What's New

• Added support for Gmail
• Added ability to send the URL list to the clipboard
• Added support for the following email applications on Windows: Windows Mail, Windows Live Mail, and Eudora 8
• Redesigned extension preferences dialog, containing new configuration options

Acknowledgements

Web mail support in Send Tab URLs is based on Email This!, a Firefox extension by Lazyrussian Productions. The code for launching Gmail is derived from John Joseph Bachir’s Gmail compose bookmarklet.

Many thanks to the Babelzilla localization team for their work in translating Send Tab URLs.

Send Tab URLs 2.0 release candidate 2

Fixes to a few spit-and-polish bugs necessitated another release candidate.

If you already have a previous version of Send Tab URLs installed, you must uninstall it first before installing this release. Because this is a pre-release build, updates will not be available automatically.

» Download: Send Tab URLs 2.0 rc2 (43 KB; compatible with Firefox 2.0 - 3.0.*)

Supported languages: English (United States), Dutch, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, Turkish.

Changes from Release Candidate 1

• Improvements to how Gmail/Google Apps are invoked so that you can do other tasks in Gmail after sending the URL list (like logging out).
• Reworked the message box that appears when a long list of URLs to Gmail or Google Apps is being sent

Acknowledgement

Web mail support in Send Tab URLs is based on Email This!, a Firefox extension by Lazyrussian Productions. The code for Gmail/Google Apps invocation is taken from John Joseph Bachir’s Gmail compose bookmarklet.

Send Tab URLs 2.0 release candidate 1

The release candidate of Send Tab URLs 2.0 is now available for download. Barring any last-minute showstopper bugs, this release should resemble the official 2.0 release of this Firefox extension.

If you already have a previous version of Send Tab URLs installed, you must uninstall it first before installing this release. Because this is a pre-release build, updates will not be available automatically.

» Download: Send Tab URLs 2.0 rc1 (40 KB; compatible with Firefox 2.0-3.0.*)

Supported languages: English (United States), Dutch, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, Turkish.

What's New in Send Tab URLs 2.0

This list is a cumulative summary of all the new features introduced since the first beta release.

• You can now send the URL list to Web-based email clients. Gmail and Google Apps are supported. There is also experimental support for Yahoo! Mail.
• The URL list can be sent to the clipboard.
• Added support for the following email applications on Windows: Windows Mail, Windows Live Mail, and Eudora 8.
• Works with up to 30 browser tabs (previously, the limit was 24). There is no limit if sending the URL list to the clipboard.
  
• Redesigned extension preferences dialog, containing new configuration options.

Changes From the Previous Beta Releases

• Bug fix: Problems when sending the URL list to Yahoo! Mail in a new browser window. On Firefox 2, a blank window appears; on Firefox 3, a window appears with an error message (bug 20050).
• If you have used the previous beta releases of Send Tab URLs, please note that if Yahoo! Mail support is enabled, you must now include the "http://" part of the Yahoo! Mail URL in the about:config preference sendtabs.mailclient.yahoomail.mail_url.
  

Things You Should Know About

• Windows users: Send Tab URLs will work with Mozilla Thunderbird, SeaMonkey Mail, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Windows Live Mail, MS Office Outlook and Eudora 8. Send Tab URLs may not work with other Windows-based email programs not listed here, especially if the URLs of the individual browser tabs are long. There is no such limitation on Linux or Mac OS X.
• If you have multiple Firefox profiles, and you are running Firefox using a profile other than the original default profile, and Thunderbird is set as the default email client, you may receive the following error when invoking Send Tab URLs: "Thunderbird is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Thunderbird process, or restart your system." To resolve this problem, close Thunderbird and try again; OR, exit Firefox and restart it using the original default profile.

Help and Support

Feedback on this release candidate is welcome. Please see the Contact page on the AE Creations website for details on how to report a bug or obtain support.

Send Tab URLs 2.0 beta 2

This is the second beta release of Send Tab URLs 2.0. Meant for early adopters craving the latest and greatest, this beta release is being made available for testing, and should only be installed if you are willing to tolerate a few bugs. If that scares you, then you should wait until version 2.0 is officially released.

» Download: Send Tab URLs 2.0 beta 2 (30 KB; compatible with Firefox 2.0.0.* - 3.0.*)

If you already have a previous version of Send Tab URLs installed, you must uninstall it first before installing this release. Because this is a pre-release build, updates will not be available automatically.

What's New

• Redesigned extension preferences dialog, containing new configuration options.
• Warning message when sending a very long URL list to Gmail or Google Apps; Gmail and Google Apps may raise an error (HTTP code 400) due to very long mailto: strings. The warning message describes a workaround.
  

Known Issues

• Problems when sending the URL list to Yahoo! Mail in a new browser window. On Firefox 2, a blank window appears; on Firefox 3, a window appears with an error message (bug 20050)
  

Help and Support

Feedback on this beta release is welcome. Please see the Contact page on the AE Creations website for details on how to report a bug or obtain support.

Using Yahoo! Mail in Send Tab URLs 2.0 beta

In the previous post, I alluded to experimental support for Yahoo! Mail in Send Tab URLs 2.0 beta. For those of you who are familiar with the Email This! Firefox extension, the instructions for enabling support for Yahoo! Mail are very similar.

Please note that Send Tab URLs will work with Yahoo! Mail classic, not the "all-new" Yahoo! Mail.

To Enable Support for Yahoo! Mail (Classic)

1. Start Firefox. Then in about:config, set the pref sendtabs.mailclient.yahoomail.enabled to true.
2. Open a new browser window or tab and login to your Yahoo! Mail account.
3. Once you are viewing your Yahoo! Mail inbox, observe the URL in the Firefox address bar. Select and copy the URL up to, and including, the last slash character (/) in the URL, and omitting the "http://" prefix.
4. Return to about:config and edit the pref sendtabs.mailclient.yahoomail.mail_url, changing its value to what you selected and copied in step 3.

After following these steps, you should now be able to send the browser tab URLs to Yahoo! Mail.

Things You Should Know About

• As stated above, this will only work with Yahoo! Mail classic, not the "all-new" Yahoo! Mail.
• The URL list generated by Send Tab URLs won't display properly when the Yahoo! Mail editor is in rich text mode. However, you can switch from plain text to rich text in Yahoo! Mail's editor to compose and send the URL list as an HTML email. (Remember to switch back to plain text mode afterwards.)
  

These two points are the reasons why support for Yahoo! Mail is considered experimental.

Acknowledgment

Web mail support in Send Tab URLs is adapted from Email This!, a Firefox extension by Lazyrussian Productions.

Send Tab URLs 2.0 beta 1

This is the first of two planned beta releases of the next version of Send Tab URLs.

Meant for early adopters craving the latest and greatest, this beta release is being made available for testing, and should only be installed if you are willing to tolerate a few bugs. If that scares you, then don't install it.

» Download: Send Tab URLs 2.0 beta 1 (25 KB; compatible with Firefox 2.0 - 3.0.*)

If you already have a previous version of Send Tab URLs installed, you must uninstall it first before installing this release. Because this is a pre-release build, updates will not be available automatically.

What's New

• You can now send the URL list to Web-based email clients. Gmail and Google Apps are supported. There is also experimental support for Yahoo! Mail; more details to come in a later post.
• You can also send the URL list to the clipboard
• Added support for the following email applications: Windows Mail, Windows Live Mail

Known Issues

The same issues of email application compatibility on Windows apply (Linux and Mac OS X users are not affected). With this release, Send Tab URLs will work with Mozilla Thunderbird, SeaMonkey Mail, Outlook Express, MS Office Outlook, Windows Mail and Windows Live Mail. Send Tab URLs may not work with other Windows-based email programs not listed here, especially if the URLs of the individual browser tabs are long.

Things You Should Know About

The maximum number of browser tabs that Send Tab URLs can handle has been raised to 30. The about:config pref that specifies the limit has been removed. This limit doesn't apply when sending URLs to the clipboard.

Help and Support

Feedback on this beta release is welcome. Please see the Contact page on the AE Creations website for details on how to report a bug or obtain support.

Send Tab URLs 1.0 released

Send Tab URLs 1.0 has been released and is now available on Mozilla Add-ons. This version is currently in the sandbox; you need to be logged in as an AMO user to install it. Otherwise, you can download and install version 0.4.1, which is still available to all users.

What's New

• Automatically detect the title from web page content if no title appears in the browser tab
• Added support for Turkish locale

What Happened to Webmail Support?

I know lots of readers will be asking about this. In my list of stuff to do for this release, I had wanted Send Tab URLs to be able to invoke Gmail or some other web-based email client for composing the email of browser tab URLs. But I ran into Gmail errors when attempting to send the URL list to it when I wasn't logged in yet to my Google account.

This would be a great feature to have in Send Tab URLs, and I've received many requests for this. Unfortunately, I will need to do some further research into getting around this error without making it so painful for the user to use, and will therefore have to defer this feature to a later release.

Update: Send Tab URLs 1.0 is now a public release on Mozilla Add-ons. You do not need to be logged in to download and install it.

Send Tab URLs to-do list

The next version of Send Tab URLs will be numbered 1.0 to reflect its stability and maturity (i.e., few new features needs to be added to this extension). Here are a few items left to tackle:

• Need to handle the situation where there is no title for a web page displayed in a tab (bug 18641)
• Remove trailing space at end of web page title (bug 18663)
• Make Send Tab URLs work with Gmail or other default, web-based email clients
  

Send Tab URLs 0.4.1 released

This minor release adds support for a few languages (made possible by the awesome translators at Babelzilla) and is compatible with Firefox 3.0 beta 2.

» Download: Send Tab URLs 0.4.1 (21.1 KB; English (United States); compatible with Firefox 2.0-3.0b2)

If you already have Send Tab URLs installed, it will be upgraded for you if automatic extension updates are enabled in Firefox. Otherwise, open Extension Manager in Firefox, then right-click on the entry for Send Tab URLs in the list of installed extensions and choose Find Update.

What's New

• Compatible with Firefox 3.0 beta 2
• Removed support for Firefox 1.5 series, which is no longer maintained by Mozilla Corp.
• Added support for Catalan, Chinese (simplified), Polish and Spanish locales

Known Issues

• On Windows, Send Tab URLs has been confirmed to work with Mozilla Thunderbird, SeaMonkey Mail, Outlook Express and MS Office Outlook. Send Tab URLs may not work with other Windows-based email programs not listed here, especially if the URLs of the individual browser tabs are long. No such limitation have been found on Linux or Mac OS X.
• On German and Russian locales, the toolbar button caption may appear in English.

See the Contact page on the AE Creations website for details on how to report a bug or obtain support.