A few months ago I noticed I had developed a terrible habit.
Every project I worked on ended up becoming 30, 40, sometimes 100+ browser tabs.
Cloud documentation, GitHub repositories, tutorials, Stack Overflow discussions, dashboards, PDFs, articles to read later...
Closing Chrome felt risky because I knew I would spend the next day trying to find everything again.
So I built a small Chrome extension for myself: Tab Session Saver.
The idea is intentionally simple:
- Save all open tabs with one click
- Restore them later with one click
- Preview what's inside a session before restoring it
Over time I added a few things that became surprisingly useful:
- Chrome tab groups support
- Export/import as JSON
- Dark and light mode
- Multiple languages
- Session management (rename, delete, preview)
One decision I made from the beginning was to keep everything local.
No account.
No cloud backend.
No tracking.
No analytics inside the extension.
Everything is stored locally using Chrome's storage APIs.
The project is also fully open source.
One of the most annoying technical challenges was handling session restoration across multiple windows while keeping tab groups intact and avoiding duplicate startup windows created by Chromium.
The extension is still a small project (around 250 users at the moment), but people are actually using it, which is both exciting and slightly terrifying.
I'm currently trying to understand what users would want next.
Some ideas:
- Session search
- Session tagging
- Optional cloud sync
- Shared workspaces
If you manage lots of tabs every day, I'd love to know:
How do you handle browser sessions today?
GitHub:
https://github.com/paoloronco/tab-session-saver
Chrome Web Store:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tabs-session-saver/njbmclamamhckchdanoobkhadhmbdobp
