Save your tabs and close them, then bring them back later
Forty tabs about one project slow Chrome down, but closing them feels risky. Save and close writes the list first, reads it back, and only then closes the tabs.
Park your tabs
Open the Plainware Tabs popup and choose Save & close all. It saves the tabs in all your windows. The popup also has Save all tabs and Save this window, which save without closing anything.
The session is written to your vault and read back. Only then are the tabs closed, and only if they’re still at the address it saved. Pinned tabs stay open by default.
If that closes every tab, the vault opens, so Chrome stays open and shows you the saved session.
Later, open the vault, pick the session and restore everything, one window, one group or one tab. You can restore into new windows or into the current one.
How restoring behaves
- Windows, order, pinned tabs and tab groups (with title, colour and collapsed state) come back.
- Only missing tabs is an option, so tabs you already have open aren’t duplicated.
- Tabs come back unloaded except the active tab in each window, so restoring many tabs doesn’t use all your memory at once. Chrome may show the address as the title until you click one.
- Saved sessions are kept until you delete them. They’re not removed by history clean-up. They are named with the date and time they were saved, and you can rename them in the vault.
Compared with other ways
- Chrome tab groups can keep a project together and can be saved and synced when you’re signed in. Plainware Tabs doesn’t replace them. It adds saved versions and backup files.
- Bookmarking all tabs works, but loses groups, pinned state and window layout.
Good to know
- Some addresses can’t be reopened by an extension, such as certain
chrome://pages. They’re listed in a report with a copy button. - Saved sessions live in Chrome’s profile. Turn on the free weekly backup file so they outlive it. See backing up tabs to a file.