Introduction

AutoBrowse is a small tray utility which monitors the Windows clipboard for URL selections. When you select a URL in a text edit field of an application or in a text editor such as Notepad, then copy the URL to the clipboard, AutoBrowse will send that URL to your browser, either automatically or after confirming the autobrowse.

AutoBrowse recognizes URL's which begin with http://, https://, news://, telnet://, ftp://, gopher://, and file://. If a clipboard selection begins with "www." or "ftp." then a http:// or ftp:// URL prefix is assumed, respectively.

Leading and trailing blanks are trimmed, so you can be a little sloppy with your selections. Otherwise, a selection is ignored if it does not look like a URL. Selections with embedded whitespace or newlines are ignored.

Installation

Simply unzip the AutoBrowse files to a directory. Let's assume you place this in "C:\apps\AutoBrowse". After unzipping the abrws1-1.zip file, C:\apps\AutoBrowse should contain AutoBrowse.exe, README, INSTALL, COPYRIGHT, and a subdirectory named docs. The docs directory should contain AutoBrowse.html and several .jpg image files (which are referenced by the html file.)

You can add a shortcut to AutoBrowse.exe to your Startup folder so that AutoBrowse is started automatically when you log on. (The InstallShield version will create a shortcut for you in the group you specify; you can copy this to your Startup folder if you wish.) Note: in order for the Help option to work, your shortcut must start AutoBrowse in the same directory where AutoBrowse is installed, with the docs directory immediately beneath it.

AutoBrowse does not add any DLLs to your system. To uninstall AutoBrowse, simply delete its directories and remove any shortcuts you may have installed.

I've had reports that AutoBrowse does not work for some Netscape Navigator users. i cannot reproduce this, but I've read that the Windows file associations that allow AutoBrowse to work are only setup when you install Microsoft Internet Explorer. After installing IE, open an Windows Explorer window (not IE) and select View, Options, File Types. You should be able to change the file association for Internet Document (HTML) so that open runs Netscape Navigator. Netscape web pages say that you must reinstall Navigator to make Netscape the default; I don't know if that is true or not.

Usage

Starting AutoBrowse

Simply start AutoBrowse by couble clicking its icon, or drag a shortcut to AutoBrowse to your Startup folder to have it started automatically when you log on.

There are no command line arguments. Do to its nature, AutoBrowse checks for an AutoBrowse instance already running and will not start a second instance.

The AutoBrowse Tray Icon

AutoBrowse runs as a tray utility, so an icon will appear in your system tray. The icon will have one of three appearances, depending on whether AutoBrowse is disabled, enabled, or enabled with the confirm option set.

enabled
enabled with confirm option
disabled

You can do two things with the icon: click with the left mouse button to disable/enable AutoBrowse, or click with the right mouse button to pop up a menu.

The AutoBrowse Menu

The following operations are available from the AutoBrowse menu.

Options

This opens the Options dialog which allows you to change the behavior of AutoBrowse.

There are four options on this dialog.

1. Enable autobrowsing of URL's copied to the clipboard

   When selected, AutoBrowse is in it's enabled state; that is, it will watch the clipboard for URL selection and take action according to the Confirm each autobrowse option. Single clicks on the tray icon toggle AutoBrowse between its enabled and disabled states. If AutoBrowse is disabled, a diagonal red line appears across the icon.

2. Confirm each autobrowse

   When selected, AutoBrowse will display a dialog box asking for confirmation before sending a URL to your browser.

3. Autobrowse email addresses If you copy what looks like an email address, such as david.biesack@mindspring.com or mailto:david.biesack@mindspring.com then a mailto: URL will be sent to your browser. (The mailto: will be prefixed if it is not there.)
4. Autobrowse only "mailto:user@host" URLs.

   AutoBrowse will ignore bare email addresses like user@host but will process those beginning with mailto:

Exit

Closes the AutoBrowse application.

Help

Displays this HTML help page.

About

Displays an About dialog.

Confirming AutoBrowse

If the confirm option is set, then AutoBrowse will display the following dialog when you select and copy a URL into the clipboard:

The default "OK" action will send the URL to your browser. The "Cancel" option will cause AutoBrowse to ignore the URL. You can click the desired button with your pointing device, or you can press the space bar to browse the URL, or press the ESC key to cancel.

When AutoBrowse is enabled, the icon indicates whether the Confirm option is active or not, as shown above.

Etc

AutoBrowse stores its options in the registry under the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\DJB Software\AutoBrowse

About

AutoBrowse was written by David J. Biesack and is Copyright 1997 David J. Biesack. You are free to redistribute AutoBrowse for any non-commercial use on the condition that this copyright notice is maintained. You may not sell AutoBrowse.

AutoBrowse is not in the public domain but it is distributed free (without charge). If you like it and use it, please send me some mail at David.Biesack (at) mindspring.com. If you don't like and don't use it, please send me mail if you have suggestions on improving it so that you will like and use it.

Bugs

• It's not a particularly useful program. I wrote it mostly as an exercise. You can achieve the same result as AutoBrowse with a couple keystrokes. Once you've copied a URL to the clipboard, simply press your Windows key (or Ctrl-Esc if you don't have a Windows 95 keyboard), press R to open the Run dialog, press Ctrl-V to paste the URL, and press Enter. Using AutoBrowse saves you a few keystrokes - if you have the Confirm option set, you need only press the spacebar to browse what you've copied to the clipboard.

  The advantage of using AutoBrowse is that the Run dialog history does not get polluted with URL's (but then again, you may see that as a disadvantage...)

• Since AutoBrowse ignores selections that contain embedded blanks, it will not handle file:// URL's that contain embedded blanks.
• AutoBrowse's list of known URL types is limited and fixed instead of being configurable.
• The shell action to perform on selection is not configurable. AutoBrowse simply sends the URL to the Windows explorer.
• The confirm dialog is not really large enough for very long URLs. It should accommodate much larger URLs.
• Installation is pretty manual. It does not create a program group or have options to add AutoBrowse to your Startup folder, like it should.
• There is no automated uninstall. You can simply delete the directory where you installed AutoBrowse.)

If you find other bugs, please let me know about them at David.Biesack (at) mindspring.com

See also the Release Notes.

David J. Biesack