Tabbed browsing is perhaps the best thing invented since sliced bread. It allows us to browse multiple sites at once, and keeps the interface clutter-free to a great extent. That said, things get a bit messy for those who’re into a habit of opening more than 20 times at once, a habit, which is not that uncommon. If you’re on Chrome and are finding it difficult to deal with this tab overload, here are seven Chrome extensions that might come in handy.
Tab Split
Every so often, especially while doing research, we end up opening 20 or sometimes 30 tabs at once. Even though that works smooth with a little extra RAM, it does get a bit difficult to navigate between the tabs as the title of each tab is barely visible to the user. Once the number of tabs goes over 30, the size of the tab-cum-titlebar becomes so small that it’s hard even to click on it. Tab Split is a nifty little Chrome extension that handles this problem really well.
Once installed, you can split off all the tabs to the right of the current tab into a new window. So, instead of 30 tabs in a single window, you’ll now have two windows with 15 tabs each, which is much more manageable than before.
The Tabs
Thetabs is a new Chrome extension that takes a visual approach to tab management. It brings all the goodness of Chrome’s much-talked about New Tab Page to your tab workflow. Once installed, theTabs shows up as a grey grid icon on your Chrome toolbar. Whenever you want to sort through your tabs, just click on it and a neat visual list of all the open tabs will pop up in a separate page. From here, you can sift through thumbnails of all your open tabs according to their position, time, URL or title.
To close a tab, simply click on the close button on its thumbnail. Also, if you hate clicking on the toolbar, theTabs lets you assign a shortcut to it, so that you’ll be able to manage your tabs instantly. Overall, an excellent tab management extension for folks who prefer something that’s visually appealing yet functional.
Too Many Tabs
Also available for Firefox, this feature-laden add-on gives you a bird’s eye view of all your open tabs. Once you click the icon on the toolbar, or hit the shortcut (Ctrl+~ by default), a nice-looking UI pops up showing you thumbnailed previews of all your open tabs. From here, you can search for a tab, close/suspend tabs and even export them to another browser or computer. Furthermore, the extension also allows you to sort through all your open tabs according to their name, web address or creation time. Owing to the sheer number of features it comes packed with, Too Many Tabs is undoubtedly one of the best tab management extensions around. Here’s a video of the extension in action:
FreshStart
For folks who do a lot of research, opening 30-40 tabs at once is not a new thing. The only problem with that however, is that when Chrome or the desktop crashes, there’s no proper way to recover that session. FrestStart is a feature-loaded Chrome extension brings this missing session-management capability to Chrome.
Once installed, it lets you save multiple tabs and windows into a single session. Moreover, it autosaves the session every few minutes so that you can get back all your tabs in case of a crash. Made by the same developer who built the aforementioned Too Many Tabs, Freshstart is a great extension for researchers, bloggers, and even Redditors who are used to opening more than 30-40 tabs at once.
Tab Statistics
Tab Statistics is a simple extension that sits quietly in your Chrome toolbar and keeps track of the number of tabs you have opened.
Not only that, but Tab Statistics also lets you know the maximum number of tabs you’ve opened on a single day. This is especially useful for those trying to curb their internet usage and also for followers of the previously discussed 3-Tab rule.
Close all tabs to the left
If you’re browsing Reddit and have opened up way more tabs than you wanted to, then don’t worry, there’s a simple way to get out of that mess. “Close All Tabs to the Left” is a simple Chrome extension that does what it says on the tin. It closes all tabs to the left of the current tab allowing us to get rid of the tab overload that we all dread so much. Especially useful if you’ve spent hours on Reddit and suddenly realized that there’s a report that needs to be submitted. Just close all the previous tabs and start research for your project on a clean slate.
Tab Position Customizer
If you’re picky about the way tabs open and close, Tab Position Customizer lets you customize tab opening and closing behavior in an easy way. Once installed, you can set Tab Position Customizer to open new tabs either in background or in foreground. Moreover, you can also choose which tab is activated once you close the current tab.
Another great feature of this extension is the configuration for tab opening position. This setting allows you to choose where a new tab opens; you can either set it to open to the left of the current tab, to the right, or set it to Chrome’s default. Even though this extension doesn’t specifically help in dealing with tab overload, it does, however, make tab management much simpler and customized.
