Thanks for your interest in Morning Coffee Quantum!
What it Does
For those who aren’t coming here from the Mozilla add-on site, here’s the sixty-second version: Everyone has websites you visit on a regular basis. You might check the weather every day. You have a web comic you like to read, but it only updates on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. You enjoy a certain reporter’s articles, but they only publish on Thursday. You can manage these in bookmarks, sure, but wouldn’t it be easier to just have a way to tell your browser, “It’s Monday…open all of the sites I care about looking at on Monday”? That’s exactly what Morning Coffee Quantum does.
Morning Coffee Quantum is a Mozilla Firefox extension. It allows you to maintain lists of websites for each day of the week (as well as an “every day” list). To add a site, simply right-click on the tab, go to the “Add Tab to…” menu item, and select what days you’re interested in. You can even manage the order of the sites, or choose to open the day’s sites in random order.
Ready to open your daily sites? Just click the coffee cup – and tabs open. It’s that easy.
FAQ
Q. The button doesn’t do anything when I click it.
A. This add-on is completely new and distinct from the original Morning Coffee, so it doesn’t know about the sites you set up in the original version. You’ll have to set them up again. You can use the tab context menu (see the add-on download page for screenshots and details) or the plugin’s options page in order to do this. Once you’ve set up your site lists, clicking the button should load your sites for the day, just as before.
Q. I’d like to quickly load my site lists to several versions of Firefox that I use. Will you write an import/export feature?
A. Perhaps one day I’ll add custom import/export functionality, but in the meantime, there’s a way for you to do this right now that’s not too complicated. Here’s how you do it:
- On the “export” computer, go to the browser extension data folder in Firefox. In Windows 7 and 10, this directory is located at C:\Users\<your user name>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<your profile>\browser-extension-data\{fbcbdc47-ebd2-42f0-b2bb-7cc902ec2f40}.
- Copy the storage.js file there. Change it as desired if you have an understanding of the JSON format, but make a backup before you do! The add-on won’t work properly if you have a malformed file.
- On the “import” computer, make sure Firefox isn’t running. Go to the same directory mentioned in step 1.
- Replace the storage.js file there with the one you copied (and possibly changed) in step 2.
That’s it!
Q. I noticed that this add-on isn’t available for Android. Do you think it will ever be?
A. Unfortunately, probably not. From what I’ve read of the add-on developer documentation, the Android version of Firefox is different enough from the desktop version to where Morning Coffee Quantum couldn’t really work on it as we know it.
Genesis
For almost as long as I have used Mozilla Firefox as my browser of choice, I have used Shane Liesegang’s Morning Coffee plugin. It was the perfect example of a basic need fulfilled simply: one button click, and all of the sites for that day pop open in tabs. It was a thing of beauty.
Then along came Firefox Quantum, and with it, the disabling of all plugins built under the old extension format – including Morning Coffee. The author has mentioned that he doesn’t have time to learn the new extension format and update the plugin. What to do?
Well, am I a programmer, or not? Javascript’s not what pays the bills, but I’ve dabbled enough to where I felt that some time spent in the documentation should get me to where I wanted to go. And so I spent a weekend learning the WebExtension structure, coding, debugging, and what you have before you is the result! For those of you who, like me, used the original Morning Coffee for many years, I hope you enjoy the Quantum blend!