Open tab from JavaScript

I’ve been super interested in productivity hacking lately. Part of my “look something up” workflow looks like this:

  1. search google for something
  2. open the first N promising looking links in new tabs
  3. click on the tab who’s favicon finishes spinning first
  4. scan, and if dead end CMD+W

I’ve found that the quicker I can see that a page is a dead end the better. It isn’t all that much work to click on each link individually, but because I do it A LOT when learning something new, I’ve always wanted a shortcut.

@vveleva and I built this awesome chrome extension (Auto Open Links): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/auto-open-links/coiapeoijgdcanenjddgdgcepejabljl

When added to chrome, it allows you to press CTRL+SHIFT+3 to open the first three google search results in new tabs.

This morning while we were exploring options for opening a new tab from javascript we stumbled upon this stackoverflow question. Some answers suggest there is no way to open a tab, other give interesting hacks, eventually we decided to build our own with these considerations:

  1. It would be nice to just use vanilla js.
  2. Only needs to work on google search results page.
  3. Must open in new tab, not new window.

NB: It’s completely possible to open a new tab with the following, but for some reason this doesn’t work on the google search results page from a chrome extension:

window.open("https://status203.me/", "_blank");

From some initial digging we found some documentation somewhere that mentions a way to create new chrome tabs:

chrome.tabs.create({ url: "https://status203.me/" }); // nope!

After testing this out, we found that it would only reliably work from the "New Tab."

At this point I started to think about how I actually open each link. Is there a way that we could simulate the actions I’m actually taking, but with javascript. Well, as I’m opening each link, I hold down the CMD key and click each link. (In chrome that’s how you open a link in a new tab).

Is there a way to construct a custom mouse event and dispatch that event to the links on the page? There is! Via the MouseEvent API!

By simply constructing an instance of MouseEvent with the options we’re interested in we could find the links and dispatch our custom mouse event to those links. Check out the code:

var event = new MouseEvent('click', {
  'metaKey': true
});
var link = document.querySelector('a#myLink');
link.dispatchEvent(event);

If for some reason, window.open isn’t working for you, consider constructing a custom MouseEvent! 🙂

Here’s the repo: https://github.com/vveleva/auto_open_links if you want to check out the extension!