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Paste-&-Go with Internet Explorer

Recently a fellow MVP, Omi, created a Firefox 3.0 extension called Paste-&-Go which allows users to copy a URL and paste it into the browser and have it open up automatically. You can download this excellent extension for Firefox here.

However, quite a few people asked for something like this in Internet Explorer. and I was surprised that many people are not really aware of the cool extensibility features of Internet Explorer called IE Browser Extensions. I had written an article for PCQuest quite a while back and also give a few “extensions” for IE for download at its forums. You can download a small set from here.

Sadly this above set does not really support pasting URLs from an external source – such as Notepad. Also, the Firefox extension only allows a single URL, while I wanted to do it for multiple URLs and open all of them up instantly. I posted on the MVP alias that I’d probably get around to writing the code during the upcoming Dussera holidays.

But I did manage getting 5 minutes free (while my son watched Disney’s Chip-‘n’-Dale) and that’s basically how much time it took to go ahead and create a browser extension for Internet Explorer that does the above. You can set this up yourself too on Internet Explorer 5 or above (including the IE8 Beta 2).

Open Notepad and paste the following code into it.Save the file as as HTML file, say, c:\Windows\Web\Paste-n-Go.htm

<HTML>
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" defer>
clip = window.clipboardData.getData("Text"); 
UrlArray = clip.split("\n");
for(i=0; i<=UrlArray.length; i++)
    window.open(UrlArray[i], "paste"+i);
</SCRIPT>
</HTML>

Open Regedit and browse over to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MenuExt
Right-click the MenuExt key and select New > Key
Rename the newly created key to Paste && Go
Double click the (Default) entry on the right pane for this new key and set the value to the location where you saved the file you created in step 1, say, c:\windows\web\Paste-n-Go.htm
Right-click the right pane and create a new DWORD (32-bit) value
Rename the new key to Contexts and set its value to 1. Your registry should look something like this now.

Copy a bunch of URLs from Notepad or another browser window

Open a new Internet Explorer window and right-click anywhere in the content area and pick Paste & Go from the context menu

This will open the URLs you copied in a window each – quite handy when trying copy a bunch of URLs someone has linked to in a forum post or a list that you have

Currently this doesn’t open the URLs in different tabs – haven’t figured that one out yet. If you know how, do leave me a note and I’ll make the required change.