How I keep project tabs without leaving 40 windows open

Tabner — Sat, 14 Nov 2026 19:43:01 +0000

I don't have a tab problem so much as a window problem. One window for the product I'm shipping. Another for a client. A third full of documentation I opened "for a minute." A fourth because I didn't want weekend reading sitting next to work. I told myself I would close them after I finished. I did not finish. I just opened a fifth window.

Closing anything felt like throwing work away. What if I needed that GitHub thread later? What if the article was the one I was going to read on Friday? So the windows stayed, the fans spun up, and I spent a surprising amount of time hunting for a tab I had already found once.

I built Tabner because I wanted those tabs to have a home that was not the tab strip. I'm the Tabner maker. Tabner is a free tab manager for Chrome, Firefox and Edge. Other Chromium browsers such as Brave can usually install it from the Chrome Web Store. What follows is how I actually use it on a normal day, not a tour of every button.

One board per project

Each project, trip or rabbit hole gets its own board. Inside the board I make groups: research, tickets, reference, "read later." Open tabs sit in a panel on the right. I drag the ones I care about into a group, give the group a colour, pin the ones I always need at the top, and leave the rest alone.

When I'm working on that project, that board is what's on screen. I'm not scrolling through forty unrelated tabs to find the two that matter this morning.

Work and personal boards live in different spaces. I switch space and only the boards for that context stay in front of me. It's a small change, but it stops a booking confirmation from sitting next to a pull request. Dark mode is in Settings if you want it.

Close the window. Keep the pages.

The habit that changed things was this: when I'm done for the day, I save the whole window as a session and close it. One click brings every tab back later. On Chrome, the tab groups come back with them.

That was the deal I couldn't get from leaving the window open "just in case." The window is gone. The session is still there, named, waiting.

If I don't need a named session and I only want every tab in the current window saved in one go, Save All Tabs does that sweep. The tabs land in a group I can search and tag, instead of lingering in the strip in case I need them later.

I can also open a group in a new window when I want that set of pages back as tabs, without restoring an entire session.

Find it again in a couple of keystrokes

Saving is only useful if I can get a page back without reopening everything. I press Ctrl+K and start typing. Tabner searches titles, links, descriptions and notes across every board I have.

I can do a similar search from the address bar: type tb, a space, and a few letters, and the saved tabs show up as suggestions.

When I save something I know I will forget, I add a short description and a tag or two. If I need a longer reminder, like "read this before the Friday review", that goes in a private note on the tab. Those notes are searchable. They also stay private even if I later share the board.

I open Tabner by opening a new tab (it becomes the new tab page) or by clicking the icon in the toolbar. The boards are then one tab away, which is the only reason this habit stuck. I don't have to go looking for the extension every time I want to put a tab away.

Let rules do the filing

I got tired of dragging every GitHub tab into the same group by hand. I told Tabner that github.com belongs in Dev, and it puts those tabs there for me. Domain rules sound fussy until you've used them for a week. Then you wonder why you were doing that job yourself.

Use it only in this browser, or not

I don't need an account to use Tabner. Without one, everything lives in the browser's own storage and never reaches our servers. If the browser's own sync is on, the browser can copy that data to my other devices. That's the browser doing it, not Tabner.

I sign in when I want the same boards on another computer through Tabner, or when I want to share a board. Sign-in is a one-time code sent to my email; there is no password. Those boards are stored on servers in the EU.

Sharing is optional. I can invite someone as an editor or a viewer and see changes live, or publish a read-only link and turn it off later. Private notes are not included in that link.

If I ever want to leave, I download a full backup from Settings. That's also what I do before uninstalling, because without Tabner sync the data lives in the browser, and uninstalling removes it.

Since version 1.10.8, Tabner also keeps a few automatic copies of my boards and sessions on this device, and I can restore one from Settings → Data Management. The copies are not uploaded to the cloud, and they are not the backup file, so I still download a backup before uninstalling. If you sync with an account, restoring a copy also changes what is in that account.

If you're coming from Toby, you can export a JSON file and import it in Settings, under Data Management. Large libraries are supported. Bookmark HTML files from Chrome, Firefox and Edge import too.

Coming from OneTab? Since version 1.10.8, Tabner imports it. In OneTab, open Export / Import URLs and copy the text. In Tabner, go to Settings → Data Management → Import from OneTab, then paste the text or pick a .txt file. A new board is created with your tabs.

The quieter browser

There are no ads in the product. We don't sell data, and we don't use it to train AI. Tabner works offline in the browser. The account is there only if you want sync or sharing.

I still open a lot of tabs. I just don't keep forty windows around to prove I might need them. The boards hold the work. Search gets me back to a page. The window can close.

Tabner is free. You can get it at tabner.es, or from the Chrome Web Store, Firefox Add-ons, and Edge Add-ons. If something is off, write to hola@tabner.es. A person reads every message.

The Tabner maker