Open TextRange selection as URL

On many forums, people post URLs as plain text and this forces me to:

• select the text URL
• ctrl+C to copy it in the clipboard
• ctrl+T to open a new tab
• paste the URL in the address bar of the newly created tab
• press "Enter" key to start navigation

I found this whole process very annoying and it seems I have to go through this many times a day. Here's my attempt to automate it by creating an extension for "Internet Explorer" similar to Linkification extension (for "Fire Fox" browser). I called my extension: "Make Link".

How it works:

• right click on text URL
• choose "MakeLink: use clicked text as link" menu item (the URL is open in a new tab automatically)

or you can

• fully select the URL text or only a part of it
• right click on selected text
• choose "MakeLink: use clicked text as link" menu item (text link is open in a new tab automatically)

DOWNLOADS:

• MSI setup file
• EXE setup file
• extension source code

Points of interests:

• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MenuExt registry key to add a item in the IE context menu
• gain access to window object passed in external.menuArguments
• document.selection property to get the selected TextRange
• TextRange methods: moveStart, moveEnd, moveToPoint, select
• The extension is entirely written in JScript (no BHO, no COM).

Known issues:

• on some web pages with horizontal scroll simply right click a text URL won't work. You need to select a part of the URL and then right click it.