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
Top comments (1)
I built something adjacent, also a no-backend Chrome extension, but for the opposite problem. Instead of saving sessions, I wanted to get text out of them quickly, selected text straight to whichever AI model I was using. Hit the same local-only decision early, and the appeal really is what you said: people trust extensions that don't phone home way more than the ones that do. The 250-user figure at the GitHub-open-source stage is a real signal too. Most extension projects never get that far, the ones that do usually got there because the founder answered a specific user complaint instead of chasing a platform feature. Session search is probably the cheapest win on your list. Indexing title plus URL is enough to beat scrolling through 50 saved sessions.