Marcin Piczkowski

Posted on Mar 7, 2019 • Edited on Jan 2, 2020

When you never close tabs on your mobile Chrome browser

#tips #mobile

Whenever I browse on my mobile I often open an interesting pages in Chrome and leave it for later. Usually the later never comes so I ended up with over 2500 open tabs in my mobile Chrome. Yes, it's not a typo !!!

Recently I wanted to do some cleanup. I was on my desktop and wanted to quickly order useful urls into some categories and bookmark for later or throw away at all if not needed anymore. I realised that there is no handy way of exporting all the open tabs from Chrome. On desktop version of Chrome there is a "Bookmark All Tabs" feature when you right-click any of the open tabs in browser, but this does not exist in mobile version.

I wanted to share with you an easy way to work-around this limitation if you're using an Android device.

You will need to install Android Dev Tools on your desktop and put your mobile device into Developer's Mode.

How to do it, step by step:

Download an install Android Dev Tools.

We will need only adb application, but we will have to install the complete toolbox anyway. Personally, I found the easiest way to download an install the Android Studio, but you could also try the stand-alone sdk tool available from here if you scroll down.

When you have installed Android Studio on Mac, you will find adb in ~/Library/Android/sdk/platform-tools

Open this folder in bash.

Put your Android phone in Developer's Mode and connect with a cable to your desktop. It's better to connect straight instead using some USB hubs, because sometimes the device cannot be discovered by adb. Here is an official instruction how to turn it on. Also, you may want to turn on MTP configuration in "Select USB Configuration" menu as described here, otherwise adb may not find your device.

When you completed the two steps above, you should be able to discover your Android device with adb. Try this from bash in folder where the adb binary is located:



./adb devices -l

It should list your device, e.g:



List of devices attached
e8acbd80               device usb:336592896X product:OnePlus3 model:ONEPLUS_A3003 device:OnePlus3 transport_id:1

Chrome mobile has a feature to expose remote debugger on tcp socket which you can access from your desktop. The so called "legacy" debugging workflow is described in Chrome developers documentation.
It is called "legacy" because now there is more fancy way of debugging mobile Chrome using Chrome Dev Tools.
For our purpose however the "legacy" way is more useful because we get access to a bare text interface in JSON format which gives easy way to extract open tabs URLs.

In short, you need to execute:



./adb forward tcp:9222 localabstract:chrome_devtools_remote

Here is more info how it works. The above line makes adb forward any connections on localhost TCP port 9222 to the abstract socket named chrome_devtools_remote over USB.

Now, you should be able to browse Chrome remote API at: http://localhost:9222

The JSON with all open tabs info is at: http://localhost:9222/json/list

It looks like that:

If you have JQ tool installed you could parse this JSON, extract only URLs and save in txt file like that:



curl http://localhost:9222/json/list | jq .[].url > mobile.tabs.txt

UPDATE:
(Thanks to Alete for this tip)

If there is more than one instance of chrome running on your Android and ./adb forward tcp:9222 localabstract:chrome_devtools_remote shows you the wrong one, you may need to find the process of the other instance like this:

First disable the undesired chrome app.
How to disable an app?
Find an app in applications.

Then hold an icon for long time until the popup menu show up.

Then choose "App info" and you should see the screen like blow.

Next, click "Disable" button.

Then on your PC in command line execute:



adb shell "cat /proc/net/unix"

Copy the output into a text editor and find chrome_devtools_remote in order to find the instance e.g.:
localabstract:chrome_devtools_remote_31723

Then



./adb forward tcp:9222 localabstract:chrome_devtools_remote_31723

At the end you can enable the app which you disabled in previous steps.

Oldest comments (49)

Pierre-Henry Soria ✨ • Mar 8 '19

Thanks for this great step-by-step tutorial Marcin! I had sometimes about 70~90 tabs opened and, yes indeed, this can definitely be useful for cleaning them up (if you are sure you will read those URLs later). I now try to save interesting URLs to Pocket and read them offline when I have time, but still your trick can be helpful when we are in this kind of situation (especially with ~2500 opened tabs!).

Marcin Piczkowski • Mar 8 '19

Glad that I could help. I'm curious why Chrome developers excluded the "Bookmark All Tabs" feature from mobile version, it would be useful so much.

Petrus Kiendys • Aug 8 '19

Dzieki Marcin!
Just what I needed to move my open tabs from my phone to the desktop!

Marcin Piczkowski • Aug 12 '19

You welcome :)

okazakikirito • Aug 31 '19

Hi thanks man this helped lot

Dariusz Kuśnierek • Sep 4 '19 • Edited

Thanks a lot! This really helped me :-) I just made a small modification:

To parse the JSON and save it to a Markdown file (with titles and urls):

curl http://localhost:9222/json/list | jq -r ".[] | \"[\" + .title + \"](\" + .url + \")\"" > mobile.tabs.md

kangarooo • Feb 19 '22 • Edited

How to make it URL clickable with a href and title to html file so i can import or click them?
what is wrong here?
curl localhost:9222/json/list | jq -r ".[] | \"(<a href="" + .url + \")">[\" + .title + \"]\"" > mobile.tabs.html

Alice Morrison • Nov 9 '19 • Edited

Hello. This is what I was looking for. Thanks. But I have Chrome installed on my Android phone and Brave browser (?id=com.brave.browser) which is also based on Chrome. I applied your instructions step by step but it exported Brave browser's tabs. not Chrome's. How can I export chrome tabs?

Marcin Piczkowski • Nov 22 '19

Hmmm.. Not sure what is happening. Can you also try these steps: developers.google.com/web/tools/ch...

Or you could try force shutting down Brave and see if that halped.

andrizmitnick • Nov 22 '19

somehow i always get :(

parse error: Invalid numeric literal at line 3, column 11

Marcin Piczkowski • Nov 22 '19

Can you check in browser on PC when you mapped port using adb command from the post: localhost:9222/json/list ?
Looks like you did not get the JSON from this address.

andrizmitnick • Nov 30 '19

Hey, thanks for the reply.
it looks like my issue was related to powershell. i need to add Select Content -Expand Content which ended up like this

curl 'http://localhost:9222/json/list' | Select Content -Expand Content | jq .[].url > mobile.tabs.txt

kangarooo • Feb 19 '22

platform-tools>curl 'localhost:9222/json/list' | Select Content -Expand Content | jq.exe .[].url > mobile.tabs.txt
'Select' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

Alete - ฿ 📈 • Nov 25 '19 • Edited

For those of you who have more than one instance of chrome running on your Android and ./adb forward tcp:9222 localabstract:chrome_devtools_remote shows you the wrong one, you may need to find the process of the other instance like this:
First I disabled the undesired chrome app (the one of my work profile, in my case), then,
adb shell "cat /proc/net/unix" (I wasn't able to grep that, because it's binary or something like that, I had to copy the output into a text editor and find "chrome_devtools_remote") in order to find the instance that was named: localabstract:chrome_devtools_remote_31723 in my case.
then:
./adb forward tcp:9222 localabstract:chrome_devtools_remote_31723 worked like a charm.

Thanks for this awesome trick!

Marcin Piczkowski • Nov 25 '19

Awsome! Thanks for the tip, I will update the post with it.

Will Wang • Dec 17 '19

Marcin, THANK YOU!! This is so handy and solve my issue :)
Besides, I found that I have to add quotation marks for jq to make it work, FYI !

curl http://localhost:9222/json/list | jq '.[].url'

benhadad • Dec 23 '19

As a dev I understand the go-to method of writing code to solve a problem. The only issue here is that Chrome has a built-in way to do the same thing. This way does have 1 drawback, and that is it will open all the tabs on your computer first before you can bookmark them.

Open a new chrome window (ctrl-N if you are in chrome)
Go to history (ctrl-h)
Select Tabs from other devices
Find your other device
Click on the action button (three vertical dots) and select open tabs
Allow tabs to start to open, then select bookmark all open tabs (ctrl-Shift-D).

No code option.

Marcin Piczkowski • Dec 23 '19

Thanks. This is a good option too as long as you have your mobile Chrome tabs synchronized with Google account. Also, not sure how Chrome desktop browser would handle over 2000 open tabs.

christophocles • Jul 28 '21

This only works with recently-accessed tabs. It will not actually get ALL of the tabs that are currently open on the device, only maybe the last 50. So this "no code" option is not adequate. There is NO built-in way to do this properly; dev tools are the only way, and this is still true 1.5 years after you wrote this comment.