I built a Chrome extension because I was tired of losing my tab sessions

Paolo Ronco — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 15:33:42 +0000

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

DEV Community: Paolo Ronco

I built a Chrome extension because I was tired of losing my tab sessions