Tabs, tabs, tabs. If you’re a multi-tasker like me, you love tabs. Perhaps a little bit too much, as it’s easy to suddenly find you have a buffet of tabs available, but you’re no longer quite sure what you have open in each one.
It’s no surprise then that there are a lot of tab management extensions available for Chrome. I’ve trimmed down the options to ten excellent extensions that might prove the perfect medicine for tabitis.
Excessive tabs are troublesome because it overwhelm Chrome’s ability to display tabs in a meaningful way. TooManyTabs solves this using a pop-out that provides a thumbnail preview of the
tabs that you have open. To top that off, TooManyTabs also includes a search field so you can quickly find what you’re looking for.
Similar in purpose to TooManyTabs, Quick Tab conquers extreme tab usage through a drop-down menu that presents all currently open tabs. A search function is also available. While TooManyTabs is likely the better choice for users who routinely open 20+ tabs, lighter tabaholics may prefer Quick Tab.
Opening multiple tabs can mean sometimes needing to close multiple tabs. Close Tabs lets you do this quickly by right-clicking anywhere on a page and then selecting an action from the Close Tabs menu. You can close tabs by domain, close all tabs to the right or left of the current tab, and perform a few other useful actions.
Once you’ve shut those tabs down with Close Tabs you can revive them with Sexy Undo Close Tab. This extension creates an icon that opens a pop-up list of closed tabs. You can reopen tabs by clicking on the page name or you can search through your history of closed tabs to find a specific option.
Managing multiple tabs is a real pain in the butt if you need to, for some reason, close your browser before you’re actually done with all of those tabs you’ve so carefully opened. Session Manager has the solution to this problem. It saves your browser state and lets you re-open the session at a later time.
Yet another way of re-opening tabs past, Recent History keeps track of all the pages you’ve recently visited and provides easy access to them via a new icon that is installed alongside the bookmark icon. You can open history pages in a new tab with a right-click, and there is a search function included as well.
Created by the same folks that made TooManyTabs, TabJump is a contextual tab navigator that pops when you click on a new icon installed beside the bookmark icon.
Rather than listing all tabs in a lump, TabJump has three columns – Undo, Related and Jump.Undo lists recently closed tabs, Related lists other open tabs from the same site you’re currently using, and Jump lists all other open tabs. It’s quite a brilliant way to organize tabs, packing maximum information into limited space.
Tab lovers are going to fall head over heels with this extension. No longer are you restricted to bringing a single computer to its knees with tens or hundreds of open tabs. Oh, no – now you can save the tabs you have open and then open them on an entirely different computer.
While powerful, the extension is simple. Your browser’s state can be saved by clicking on the disk icon in the pop-up, and then restored on any PC. You do need to log in with your Google account to enable this functionality.
This extension doesn’t add much to the Chrome interface. It’s instead a simple behavior modification extension that forces Chrome to the last selected tab whenever you close a tab. You can also make slight modifications to the default behavior of new tabs, forcing them to open in the background or changing their position on the tab list.
Ever wonder just how much of a tabaholic you are? Now you can find out! TabCounter provides you with several fun statistics including the number of tabs you’ve opened today, the number of tabs you currently have opened, and the number of tabs you’ve opened since you installed the extension. There’s not a lot of practical use, but it’s fun to geek out about.
Conclusion
Now you can go tab-crazy without losing yourself under the weight of a thousand webpages. Alright, perhaps a thousand is an exaggeration – but you get the point.
As usual, I encourage readers to share their own favorite Chrome tab extensions. There a lot of them available, and I’m sure some that are not listed here are in active use by our readers. So let’s hear all about your favorites.
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