<Big, heavy hint>By the way, the hardcover version looks very nice!</Big, heavy hint>

I’ve started you off. It’s very basic – it assumes that image url’s in the css are absolute and not relative (at least i think it does – I’m not 100% sure about the intricacies of getcomputedstyle) but it does actually work:

http://www.jamesbooker.co.uk/projects/linkbackimage/download/linkbackimage-1.0.xpi

Let me know what you think (you obviously have my email from this comment)

I created an extension called ThisTab! which forces links to open in the current tab – i suspect to change this to do what you want, it’d be a very small change to my code:

Firefox took it off the addons page because i never submitted an FF2 friendly version to their addons page, but i did actually update it, you can find it here: http://www.jamesbooker.co.uk/projects/thisTab/download/thistab-2.0.xpi

I hope this helps

First, pop up Firebug (an amazingly useful developer extension), then click “Inspect” and click on the link whose background you want to find. Once you do, you’ll see the source code of the link the left side of Firebug, and the CSS on the right side. If you mouse over the filename of the image in the CSS panel it’ll give you a little hover preview of the image and it’s dimensions. From there, you can right-click and “Open image in new tab”.

This may sound link a long process, but after you do it a few times, it becomes second nature.

Hope this helps!

The only other way I’ve managed to find the image if not using the web developer toolbar is by actually finding the reference to it within the style sheet; what can you do?