How to "drag and drop" folders or multiple HTML files into a browser and have them open in multiple tabs

Question

I save pages that I browse on the net and find interesting into a folder called C:\PageSaves

Later, during the commute, I open these pages to see what they are and move them into a neatly categorized folder tree.

For example, Perl related pages goto C:\Pages\Perl, MySQL related pages goto C:\Pages\MySQL and so on.

I was wondering if there is any way I could

1. open any number of HTML files on disc / inside a folder (C:\PageSaves in my case) into Mozilla/FF/K-Meleon etc

   For example, I would like to just "drag and drop" the folder C:\PageSaves into FireFox and have it open all the .html pages in the folder in a separate tab

   Right now, if I "drag and drop" multiple HTML files, it just opens the last file in the selection.

2. Have a set of toolbar buttons, basically, a (the) plugin that should allow me to nuke the page (if I don't want to keep the page anymore) from disc or move the file (and its corresponding folder) into a predefined / new folder

I am familiar with coding full blown FireFox plugins, so even if something very basic/almost similar exists, I can take it forward.

Hints/clues/other methods of achieving the same result are all welcome!

Answer 1

You save entire pages in hierarchical folders? Or do you mean you save bookmark shortcuts?

Your file system is absolutely the worst bookmark manager you could possibly have chosen, and backing the Internet up onto your personal computer is unnecessary at best. Rather than reinvent the wheel, why not use something designed to manage large collections of bookmarks?

You can perform a search for 'bookmark manager' and find a thousand solutions; you can use Google Bookmarks, you can use Xmarks, you can use Delicious, you can use any one of these...

Personally, I use delicious.com and its Firefox plugin. When I come across a page I want to read later, I tag it as "read-later." When the time comes, I read the page and edit the tag.

• Benefits: (1.) I can check my read-later tag from every device I have, including my phone and my Kindle. (2.) Individual bookmarks can have multiple tags. (3.) If my laptop gets dropped off a cliff, my bookmarks still exist online. (4.) I can share my bookmarks with others.
• Drawbacks: (1.) This solution won't open multiple bookmarks into tabs. (2.) You need to be connected to utilize this solution.

If you must organize your bookmarks while offline, I'd suggest setting your browser to cache pages and using its built-in bookmark manager, rather than saving pages onto your hard drive and using your file system to organize them.

Also: while Firefox doesn't know how to open multiple locally-saved pages into tabs, it does know how to open shortcuts into separate tabs. So maybe you could figure out some way to save pages locally and then make a shortcuts to them in, say, a bookmarks folder called PageSaves. Then you could open all your pages into tabs at once, even if they are local.

Answer 2

With *nix / bash, you can do firefox /path/to/pages/*.html. Windows powershell might have something similar, or you could install cygwin to get *nix/bash under Windows.