Open a list of URLs as a tab grid

Every morning you open the same four tabs: Hacker News, Lobsters, GitHub Trending, arXiv cs.AI. Or whatever your version of that ritual is — a dashboard, a Jira queue, a Slack channel, a metrics page. Clicking through bookmarks one by one is fine; doing it five days a week is fifteen seconds of toil per day. This template gives you a single "Run" button that opens your canonical set in a tab grid, all at once. Useful for devs starting the day, traders opening their watchlist, or PMs doing a status sweep.

How this workflow works

Five blocks. This is the simplest possible workflow shape in the extension — no waits, no scrapes, no exports. Just open and stop.

1. manual_trigger — Sidepanel Run. targetTab: "new" opens a fresh starting tab.
2. new_tab — Opens https://news.ycombinator.com.
3. new_tab — Opens https://lobste.rs.
4. new_tab — Opens https://github.com/trending.
5. new_tab — Opens https://arxiv.org/list/cs.AI/new.

Each new_tab block fires sequentially. Chrome batches them, so visually you'll see them open in rapid succession over about a second. The workflow has no wait_for blocks because we're not interacting with the pages — we just want them open. Letting Chrome handle the load timing is faster than blocking on each one.

Customising it for your case

This template is a "fill in the blanks" starter. The customisation IS the customisation.

• Swap the URLs. Edit the data.url field on each new_tab block. Type whatever URLs match your morning ritual: https://gmail.com, https://app.linear.app, https://notion.so/your-workspace, your status page. Order matters only for visual focus — the last-opened tab is the active one when the workflow finishes, so put the "first thing you want to read" last.
• Add or remove tabs. Add a sixth new_tab block: copy block five, point it at a new URL, wire block five's next to the new block's id. Remove a tab by deleting the block and re-wiring next. The graph editor handles this with drag-and-drop.
• Schedule it. Replace manual_trigger with schedule_trigger, mode: "cron", cron: "30 8 * * 1-5" — every weekday at 8:30 AM, your tabs are already open by the time you sit down. Note: the browser must be open for schedule_trigger to fire.

Common gotchas

Three honest pitfalls. First: some sites detect "all tabs at once" as suspicious and may show a slow-load splash screen instead of the real page. Usually fine — they catch up within a few seconds. Second: if any URL requires authentication and you're not logged in, you get the login page in that tab instead of the content. The workflow doesn't try to log in. Third: opening 10+ tabs simultaneously on a low-memory machine can pin Chrome's CPU; keep the grid under 6-7 tabs unless you have ample RAM.

FAQ

Do I need to be signed into the destination sites? Only if those sites require auth to show useful content. The workflow opens URLs in your existing Chrome profile, so any cookies you already have (sessions, login state) carry over.

Will it close my existing tabs? No. new_tab adds tabs alongside whatever you have open. Nothing gets closed unless you add a close_tab block (this template doesn't).

How is this different from Chrome's bookmark folders? Chrome's "Open all" on a folder does roughly the same thing, but bookmarks live in your browser and require manual edit. This workflow lives in BNOD, can be exported as JSON, scheduled, or shared across machines via export/import. Automa and Bardeen both offer equivalent "open URL" blocks if you want to port the pattern.