Page Collection Links

Some colleagues and I have been kicking around the idea of being able to link to a collection of URLs, what we’re calling a “page collection”.

For example, say you’re researching accommodations for a trip and want to share all the options with a friend. Today you have to copy each link one by one and the friend has to open each one by one.

We think the browser could be more useful here. In this example, imagine being able to send a single link which opens the multiple pages into an easily managed tab group. In the future, browsers could experiment with improved UI to make grouping and reading a collection like this easier and more useful (i.e. tab groups are what we have today but this seems like an interesting area to explore new UIs).

We’ve detailed some ideas, though nothing finalized or concrete, in our explainer. To summarize, we’re currently considering two approaches:

• A new URL scheme that supports multiple links. e.g. collection://https://example1.com;https://example2.com;https://example3.com
• Extending text/uri-list or adding a new MIME type and specifying how browsers should treat a response with content-type: text/uri-list.

Of course, there’s lots of caveats and issues to think through, we’ve tried to cover as much as we can in the explainer but it’s still quite early stages.

I’m interested to hear what others think of the use case? Any feedback on the potential approaches? Any other approaches we could consider? Would anyone like to join us in incubating this?

Thanks!

Firefox allows extensions to rewrite responses based on content type, so you could prototype text/uri-list support like that. It’d probably be pretty easy to add it to my extension txtpage which adds support for text/markdown and text/gemini.

Yeah, an extension would certainly be a quick way to prototype this and try it out. The drawback is that it has limited utility since the link can’t be shared (unless you know the recipient also has the extension installed).