I admit it. I’m one of those people who has tons of tabs open, and by tons, I mean 172 tabs currently. *sigh* And when I lose one of them – or *gulp* all of them – it’s very painful.
I know I shouldn’t do it, but it’s such an easy way to keep track of projects I’m working on, things I want to read about later, and even recipes I want to try at some point, some day.
Not all of these things are important, but some of them are critical, and with the way Chrome’s history tracks things, if I lose my session, it’s almost impossible to find everything again in history (if I even remember all the things I would need to search for).
Lately, my computer has been having some battery issues, so I have been needing to restart more frequently than usual. Normally, I choose Restart, check the box to reopen all windows, and everything is fine when I start back up again. Now, though, there’s a good chance that when my computer boots back up, it will take too long to reconnect to the wifi, which means I have to go through and manually reload all 170+ tabs. Or, I will get a clock error which prevents the pages from loading (also requiring manual reloading of all pages). And the worst issue of all, Chrome somehow can’t reopen my previous session when rebooting, and all my tabs are lost.
I figured there must be others out there like me, so someone has probably created a solution. I did some digging and found Session Buddy, which is an add-on for Chrome that stores a history of your browser tabs. It allows you to reopen a save point in history (limited to a few save points, but so much better than nothing) and get back your tabs from that point. It even has the option to open them in their original organization or open them all in one window, which can be very handy when working on certain projects.
One other feature that I really love is that it opens a new browser tab and shows you everything you currently have open organized by window. Chrome’s “Window” list in the menu only shows you the active tab in each window and isn’t searchable. With Session Buddy’s browser tab list, you can see all of the tabs in each window, and you can easily do a Find search to locate the window you are looking for. This has saved me so much time! I often open links from my email or other programs which open in whatever is the active window at the time. Then, I can’t find that window in the Open Windows list in Chrome because the new tab that opened has nothing to do with the topic of the other tabs in that window, and I end up having to flip through all the windows looking for the one with the tabs I want. Now with Session Buddy, I click one button to open my tabs list, command+F to search, and within seconds, I’ve found the tab I need and I am back to being productive.
You can get Session Buddy from the Google store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-buddy/edacconmaakjimmfgnblocblbcdcpbko