Can I modify the right mouse button tray options?

Factual Questions
1

Tech Question:

Like every other doper, I am sure, I use the “Favorites” button on my browser(Explorer 5) about once every ten seconds. The biggest pain in the ass I find is that I have to go up to “File” first then pull down to “New”, then “Window”, then push the button on my “Favorites” tray. You know the routine. Well, on my laptop it is a pain in the ass to open up a new window because I have a touchpad mouse which is, IMHO, is the suckiest invention ever.

My question is can I modify the pull-down tray options on my right mouse button to include the “Open Link in [u[New Window” option?

2

Don’t you have the blue E right next to your start button? just click it and you have a new window. If you deleted it, you can create a shortcut to IE and drag it down there.

Favorites tray? I always use the pull down menu myself.

3

In IE, you can type ctrl-N to open a new window. The new window will contain a copy of the current window, so usually I immediately hit ESC to stop the loading of the duplicate content. Then go where you want with the favorites.

4

Ctrl-n also works with Netscape for opening a new browser window, but Netscape goes to either the last page opened (like IE), the homepage, or a blank page. I don’t know about Esc to stop the loading process in Netscape, though.

5

Another useful keystroke in IE is ctrl-L, which is the equivalent of “open”. So, you type <ctrl-L>www.xyz.com<enter>

Hmmm. Just tried ctrl-O, and that seems to do the same thing.

6

Another trick: if you want to make a link in your favorites bar which always opens a new window with the link, do this:

  1. Create a shortcut to the page you want in your favorites bar
  2. Right click on the shortcut and choose “properties”
  3. In the “URL” field, change the value from:
    http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/
    to:
    javascript:window.open(“http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/”);
  4. Click ok (also clicking ok to the alert that claims “javascript:” is a not a registered scheme).

Voila. Now you have a button which opens a new window with your favorite URL.

7

Perfect except for one thing.

I transferred everything you wrote, even the semicolon at the end, and it first gave me a warning pop-up that read “The protocol “javascript” does not have a registered program. Do you want to keep this target anyway?” I pressed “yes”. Now every time it opens another window opens with it, totally blank except for the word “[object]” in the upper left hand corner. How do I get rid of this useless window?

Thanks everyone.

8

I almost never use the Favorites button on the toolbar. Until recently, I used ctl-N followed by the Favorites pulldown menu.

But about 2 weeks ago I tried clicking on the Favorites entry on the Start button menu. Click on that, access your favorite and voilà! It opens in a new IE instance.

I feel pretty stupid because I’ve been using Win98 for 2 or 3 years and only found this out now. My excuse is that I was using AOL (which I’m just getting rid of). But I’m glad I did find it because it’s very convenient.

9

Picky, picky. :slight_smile: So you apparently want to be able to use this link even when IE is not already open (i.e. you’ve copied it to your desktop or something, right?). The problem is that it needs a window to actually execute the javascript in. You’re not clicking the link from within an IE window, so it creates one. The javascript then creates a new window, and you’re left with this dumb empty window.

But you don’t care why, right? You just want it to behave better. This forced me to do a little head scratching, but I finally got it. Here’s what the link should say:

javascript:url=“http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/”;if(String(window.location).match(/^javascript:/)){window.location=url;}else{void(window.open(url));}

Note: preview is showing spaces added to this around the semicolons, and they shouldn’t be there. Remove all spaces from this before pasting it in.

What it does is first looks to see if the current window’s URL starts with “javascript:”, which means it’s an empty window created just to run this code. If it is, it just redirects the current window to the desired URL. If not, it creates a new window. Whee!