Keeping track of open tabs can be overwhelming, and with too many tabs open, you risk running into a performance issue. While Chrome doesn’t provide a built-in way of organizing your tabs, many extensions can help get the job done.
If you’re trying to figure out which tab organizers are best for you, you’ve come to the right place. This article will highlight the best tab organizers that will help boost your productivity and give you back the control you’ve lost to your browser. Let’s get started.
Organize Your Chrome Tab Life
The Chrome Web Store is flooded with tab managers, but finding one that’s not quirky and respects user privacy is quite a hassle. A good tab organizer should be user-friendly, easy to learn, and safe. As a bonus, the extension should also be lightweight. A lightweight extension has reduced memory usage, making it less likely to compromise your computer’s performance. After all, we primarily opt for extensions to boost our productivity, not harm it.
The extensions we’ve listed below meet the criteria, and you’ll not run into many issues. Without further ado, here are the best Chrome Extensions for organizing tabs.
OneTab
OneTab is an excellent tab manager with a focus on saving memory and reducing clutter across your browser. The extension lets you have all your open tabs under one list. If you need to close the tabs you’re currently working on but are afraid to lose them, OneTab is your tab manager. It allows you to close the tabs you’re currently working on, and of course, you can always restore them whenever you want.
As a side note, always export your tabs because they tend to get lost once you perform any Chrome updates. To do so, follow these steps.
- Open the OneTab extension.
- Open the tabs you want to export.
- On the right side of the window, click on “Export / Import URLs.”
- On the next page, you should see a list of all the tabs you’d like to export. Just copy the list and paste them to a file on your computer.
Many Chrome extensions are known to infringe on user privacy. OneTab isn’t one of them. The data you share with the extension isn’t available to its developers, making it a trustworthy choice.
Toby
Toby is more than just a tab organizer because it helps you manage your workflows when working online. One feature that makes Toby a great pick is the ability to group your favorite tabs into collections. You can think of collections as an organized version of bookmarks.
An excellent way to use the feature is by grouping related sites under a single collection. For instance, you can place all of your social media sites into one collection and your work-related websites into another. This makes accessing your frequently visited sites easy because all you have to do is open the collection and click the site you’d like to visit. As a result, you don’t have to keep navigating to the search bar and typing in the site’s name every time you want to visit it.
Speaking of collections, here’s how to create a collection in Toby.
- Launch the Toby extension and open the sites you want to add to a collection.
- Click the button that says, “ADD COLLECTION.”
- Name your collection.
Toby will automatically detect the open tabs and will list them on the right side of the window. Drag and drop the listed tabs into the collection you’ve just created.
Toby makes it simple to handle projects and task-oriented activities by letting you open all the tabs that belong to one collection at once. Let’s take the scenario where you want to complete a design project. You can make a collection and include all the tabs related to that project (such as Canva, Photoshop, and Figma). To resume that specific project, simply hover over the collection, click Open, and all the tabs will open in a new window. You can now work on your newly created project without interruption from other unrelated tabs.
In addition, the tabs that are listed on a collection aren’t etched in stone. You can easily add or remove tabs from a collection to make it even more efficient and specific.
Workona
Workona is your go-to Chrome extension should you need to supercharge your productivity. The extension is quite similar to Toby, except it’s built around workspaces and not collections. While the names of the core features are somewhat different, they perform pretty much the same task.
Workona lets you group your tabs that serve the same purpose into a set, usually called a workspace. A workspace can be handy if you’re working on different projects, making it easier to work on a single project at a time.
Another feature that makes Workona a worthwhile tab organizer is the ability to suspend tabs directly from the extension’s homepage. This greatly helps save memory and generally reduces CPU strain when your computer is already suffering from tab overload.
Workona Tab Suspender
Although they are built by the same team, Workona Tab Suspender is totally different from Workona. The Workona Tab Suspender allows you to suspend the tabs that aren’t currently open, saving your CPU from unneeded overload.
The Great Suspender used to do a wonderful job suspending tabs, but the extension was pulled off the Chrome Web Store following malware complaints by users. Worry not, because Workona Tab Suspender provides an even better replacement.
Tab Hibernation
No matter how good your tab organization game is, if your computer’s RAM is being taxed, you won’t be able to work as efficiently as you could. And that’s where the power of Tab Hibernation comes into play. This extension does exactly what its name implies: it hibernates every tab except the one you’re currently using. All you have to do is click the extension’s icon in the top-right corner of the screen once you install it. If you need to use a hibernated tab, open it and click Wake up.
Although the extension is not jam-packed with loads of features, it’s pretty solid at what it does. Why be a jack-of-all-trades when you can be the master of one?
Snoozz
Snoozz is an interesting entry on the list, and it works like Tab Hibernation. This extension lets you snooze the tabs you’re currently not using, saving memory and battery time. Depending on your needs, you can snooze an individual tab or all the tabs contained in a window. But what happens once you snooze the tabs? Are they lost? No, your snoozed tabs are just in a sleep-like state, and you can conveniently access them in the Nap Room anytime you need to.
You can also adjust the settings to open snoozed tabs automatically based on specified time intervals. For example, you can have specific tabs open every Monday at eight in the morning.
The team behind Snoozz takes user privacy seriously, and they won’t sell or misuse your data.
Session Buddy
If you like hoarding tabs and can’t bring yourself to close them, then Session Buddy is your buddy. The extension lets you save the tabs you currently have open as a session. That way, whenever you accidentally close your tabs, you don’t have to worry about how you’ll recover them. Instead, you just have to open Session Buddy, and you’ll find all your tabs patiently waiting for you in the form of sessions, just as they were.
Unfortunately, Session Buddy doesn’t allow you to sync your active sessions to your Google account, let alone on another computer.
Tab Manager Plus
So you’ve ended up opening 50 tabs, and finally, you’ve just lost any productivity you could have accomplished with your browser. Maybe you should give Tab Manager Plus for Chrome a try. This tab manager will show you all the open tabs in one place. If that’s not enough to get you hooked, it will also show you duplicate tabs so you can save some memory and space by closing the duplicates.
While Tab Manager Plus is quite a handy tool, its developers haven’t updated the extension for some time now. Therefore, don’t be surprised if the extension feels a little dated and buggy. Regardless, it’s a great tool to have when it comes to tab organization and management.
TooManyTabs
Having too many tabs open at once heavily impacts your productivity and makes it even harder for you to track which tab you need to navigate back to if you need to retrieve some information. Too many tabs open also makes it impossible for Chrome to display content correctly. But worry not. TooManyTabs for Chrome helps you preview the content in different tabs, making it easier to know which one contains the information you need.
TooManyTabs allows you to search for different tabs and sort them according to date, title, or domain name.
QuickTabs
QuickTabs is quite similar to TooManyTabs, except that it lists the tabs as a single list instead of organizing them into widgets. What makes it more practical is the ability to search for the listed tabs, which is really a time-saver if you have too many tabs open. If you consider yourself a tab-a-holic, then this tab manager is your best bet.
Take Back Control. You Deserve It.
Working online is all sunshine and rainbows until you start uncontrollably opening tabs and can no longer keep track of them. This results in wasting time that would have been better spent somewhere else. Apart from the time aspect, think memory. Too many open tabs will compromise your computer’s performance, further slowing down your workflow. But thanks to the abovementioned tab organizers, you can finally get your browser under control again.
Organized tabs will help you get more focus, hopefully making your work more enjoyable, so you get more done.
What are some exciting Chrome extensions you’re currently using to organize your tabs? Please share them with us in the comments section below.
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