Chrome is a popular web browser and extension manager. It has a lot of features, but one of its most popular extensions is the Tab Manager. This extension lets you manage all your tabs in one place. You can see which tab is currently open, how many tabs are open, and where they are located on the screen. You can also close any tabs without affecting the others. The Tab Manager is a great extension for managing your Chrome browser sessions. It’s easy to use and makes it easy to keep track of your work while you’re online.
Crashing pages, slow performance, or just not being able to find that one tab you need to get back to—you’ve probably felt the effects of tab overload. If you use Chrome, though, there are some great extensions to help you manage all those tabs.
Generally, we don’t recommend using any extensions you don’t have to—they can be a privacy nightmare. But until Google builds some better tab management solutions into Chrome, those of us who like keeping 287 tabs open at once have to rely on extensions to keep us sane. We’ve rounded up some of the best extensions for managing tabs in Chrome. And, while there are a ton of these extensions out there (and everyone has their favorites), we’ve kept our list to well-regarded extensions without reported privacy issues.
Let’s take a look.
The Great Suspender: Preserve Your System Resources
The Great Suspender doesn’t help you manage or organize your tabs, but it does help improve your browsing experience significantly.
Chrome consumes a lot of RAM, and the situation becomes worse as you open more tabs. While Chrome is pretty good at freeing up memory when you need it for other things, having lots of tabs open can still affect performance—in your browser and on your PC in general.
The Great Suspender saves you from that misery by automatically suspending inactive tabs after an interval that you define. The suspended tabs stay open in the browser window, but don’t consume any resources. Suspended tabs are slightly dimmed in the title bar.
When you switch over to a suspended tab, you can reload it with a single click. Here is how a suspended tab page looks.
To avoid losing important information, The Great Suspender does not suspend pinned tabs and tabs that have an active text input, like forms. You can also temporarily exempt certain tabs from being suspended and even whitelist entire domains so that any page from those domains never gets suspended.
There is one thing you should be careful of if you decide to test out The Great Suspender. If you uninstall it from Chrome, any currently suspended tabs are closed. So, make sure you reload those tabs first if you want to keep them around.
One Tab: Suspend Tabs and Get Them Out of Your Way
OneTab lets you suspend tabs and get them out of the way so that you’re browser isn’t so cluttered. It does not automatically suspend tabs the way The Great Suspender does. You have to click the extension button on your address bar to make it happen.
When you do, all the tabs in the current Chrome window are moved to a single tab, and presented as a list. You can just click any page on the list to reopen it in a tab. Also, the fact that it only affects the current Chrome window is actually a pretty nice feature.
If you open more tabs in that same window, and then activate OneTab again, it saves the new tabs into their own group on that same page, broken up by when you saved them.
You also can send tabs to OneTab by using context menu on any page. Right-click anywhere on a page, point to the “OneTab” entry, and you’ll see all kinds of fun commands. You can send just the current tab to OneTab, send all tabs except the current one, or send tabs from all open Chrome windows. There’s even an option for adding the current domain to a whitelist to prevent pages from that domain from being sent to OneTab at all.
There is no search option on the OneTab, but you can use Chrome’s built-in search feature (just hit Ctrl+F on Windows or Command+F on Mac) to search your saved tabs. You can also drag and drop tabs from one session to another to better organize your saved tabs.
There also are plenty of sharing features in OneTab. You can share individual sessions—or all your saved tabs—by creating a unique OneTab URL.
The only drawback of OneTab is that there are no automated backups offline, or to the cloud. You can, however, back up saved tabs manually as a list of URLs and even import them later.
Tabs Outliner: Suspend and Browse Tabs in a Tree Stucture
Tabs Outliner is an interesting entry on this list. You activate it by hitting its icon on your address bar.
This pops up a window showing all your open tabs, grouped by the Chrome window to which they belong. You can double-click any tab on the list to jump right to it. That functionality by itself is pretty useful for navigating a long list of open tabs. You can also drag and drop tabs (or windows) into other sessions to organize your tabs better.
But that’s only the start.
If you hover your pointer over an tab in the list, you’ll see a little pop up tag with several options.
Click the pencil icon to edit the name of the tab. Rather than renaming the actual tab, it lets you prepend the tab name with some text to help you organize and identify it. Here, for example, we’ve added “Tuesday” to the name to help us remember when we might want to look at this tab again.
The trash closes the tab entirely, and the X icon suspends the tab. When you suspend a tab, it’s title is dimmed in the Tabs Outliner window. In the image below, the dimmed tabs are suspended, the tabs with blue text are open, and the tab with white text is the currently selected tab in Chrome.
You can also access the same options by hovering your pointer over the window in the Tabs Outliner window. This lets you suspend a whole window full of tabs all at once.
And here’s the best part. You just double-click to open a suspended tab, and Tabs Outliner opens the tab in its original context. So, for example, if you had a whole window of suspended tabs and you opened several of those, they’d all open in their own window—just like they were originally.
Tabs Outliner does not have any sharing options, but you can export the entire tree and share the file in any way you like.
Automated backups are supported, but in the free version, they are infrequent. You can also perform a manual backup to Google Drive. If you upgrade to the paid version ($15), Tabs Outliner makes local and cloud backups automatically, and you will also get access to keyboard shortcuts to manage your saved tabs.
Note: Just like with the other extensions that can suspend tabs, if you uninstall Tabs Outliner while you have suspended tabs, those tabs will be closed. So, make sure you reload all your tabs before uninstalling.
Toby: Organized Saved Tabs and Share Them With Teams
Toby is about a little more than just organizing tabs. You can use it to save, suspend, and organize tabs, yes, but it also serves as a fair replacement for bookmarks.
Toby replaces your new tab page with it’s own organizational page for managing tabs. Toby uses Collections to organize tabs, and you’ll see those at the left of the page. In the image below, we’ve got collections named “Daily” and “HTG”—each with a couple of pages already saved in them.
On the right, you’ll see a list of all open tabs in the current Chrome window. You can drag any tab there into a collection to close the tab and save it as part of that collection. You can also click the “Save Session” button to save the whole list of tabs to it’s own session collection, which you can later reopen all at once or individually. The image below shows all those tabs saved as a session, which is named by the date and time they were saved, by default.
You can open any page by just clicking it. And the page stays saved in your collection until you remove it manually—they’re more like bookmarks than suspended tabs in that way. You can also open all pages in a collection at once by clicking the “Open x Tabs” button. This is great for reopening a session you saved, or reopening a collection of related tabs.
Toby works great as a tab and bookmark manager, but it’s real strength lies in its sharing and team features. You can share any collection by hitting the Share link to its right. You’ll be given the option to get a link you can share with people or to share the collection privately with an organization you’ve set up. Organizations can even have dedicated collections for teams.
Of course, you don’t have to work in an organization to use these features. Even if you’re a freelancer, you could create a team for each of your clients, and share collections with them privately.
Hopefully, these extensions can get you on your way to better-managed tabs, no matter how you like to use them. Have a favorite we didn’t include? Let us know about it in the comments!
