How to Open and Check a List of URLs in Your Browser

Anyone who works with links eventually ends up with a list of them: the twelve staging pages QA opens every morning, the landing pages in a campaign, the sources for a piece of research. Opening them one at a time is tedious, and checking whether they still work is worse. This guide covers how to handle a list of URLs as a single unit — opening, checking, grouping and exporting — and where the browser's own security rules put a hard limit on what any web-based tool can tell you.

Start with the list, not the link

Paste your URLs into the URL Opener, one per line or comma separated, and press Add to List. You can also drop in a file: plain text, CSV, JSON, an XML sitemap, or the bookmarks HTML your browser exports.

Once the URLs are a list rather than a blob of text, everything else becomes a bulk operation — select rows, then open, check, tag, group or delete them together.

Opening: tabs, windows, or an embedded frame

Five opening modes cover the usual needs:

• New tab — the default, and the one browsers cooperate with most reliably.
• New window and sized popup — useful for putting a page beside your work at a fixed size.
• Embedded frame — loads the page inside the tool at a phone (320×480), tablet (768×1024), desktop (1200×800) or custom viewport.
• Current tab — navigate away, with a confirmation first.

Two practical notes. Browsers block popups that are not the direct result of a click, so allow popups for the site before running a large batch. And a blank embedded frame is not a bug: most large sites send `X-Frame-Options: DENY` or a `frame-ancestors` policy that forbids embedding, and there is no way for a page to override that.

Batch opening without melting the browser

Batch Open adds the controls that make a long list survivable: a delay between opens, a batch size that pauses between chunks, a maximum total, and random or list order. Two seconds between opens and batches of five is a sensible starting point. Twenty tabs opened at once will stall the machine long before the browser refuses them.

Checking: what a browser can and cannot see

This is the part most tools are vague about, so it is worth being exact.

A web page cannot read the HTTP status code of another website unless that site sends an `Access-Control-Allow-Origin` header allowing it. That is the same-origin policy — a core browser security rule, not something a tool can code around. The consequence is a two-stage check:

1. When the site allows cross-origin reads: you get the real status code, content type, content length, whether it redirected, and the final URL.
2. When it does not: the request still either completes or fails. A completed request proves the server answered and gives you a response time; the status code stays unreadable. The tool labels this "reachable, opaque" rather than pretending it saw a 200.

The same boundary rules out a few things people reasonably ask for. SSL certificate details, full redirect chains, and SEO analysis of a remote page all require fetching and reading that page, which needs a server. Setting a custom User-Agent or extra request headers is a privileged browser capability that pages do not have.

Read an "Unreachable" result carefully, too. A firewall, an ad blocker, a DNS failure, and a server that simply rejects cross-origin requests all surface as the same network error. Confirm by opening the URL before you report a link as broken.

Keeping the list organised

Groups, tags, categories and notes turn a scratch list into something worth keeping. Categories are guessed from the domain automatically — social, search, developer, news, e-commerce and so on — and you can override any of them. Groups carry a colour and an icon, and a whole group can be opened in one click.

Sorting by status or response time is the fastest way to find what needs attention: the broken and the slow float to the top.

Cleaning URLs before you share them

The normalizer applies the tidying rules you would otherwise do by hand: lowercase the hostname, drop the default port, collapse duplicate slashes, sort query parameters, remove the fragment, force HTTPS, and strip tracking parameters such as `utm_source`, `gclid` and `fbclid`. Preview the changes before applying them to the list.

Stripping tracking parameters matters more than it looks. They describe where *you* found a link, not what the page is, and they travel with every copy of it you paste to someone else.

Exporting and monitoring

Export as plain text, CSV, JSON, XML, Markdown, a printable report, or a bookmarks HTML file your browser can import directly. Scheduled checks re-run the list on an interval and log every status change, which is useful for watching a deploy — with the honest caveat that it only runs while the tab is open, and cannot email you when something breaks.

Your list, groups, tags and history stay in your browser's local storage. Nothing is uploaded; the only network traffic is the requests to the sites themselves when you open or check them.

Related tools

To break a single URL down into its components, URL Parser does the detailed anatomy, security and query-string work. For the encoding layer, URL Encoder/Decoder handles percent-escapes, and IP Parser covers addresses rather than links.