DEV Community

Tabs in One
Tabs in One

Posted on Originally published at tabsinone.wordpress.com

Tabs in One: Collapse All Your Chrome Tabs Into a Single Column (and Free Up RAM)

If you're reading this, you probably have 40+ tabs open right now. Chrome is eating 4 GB of RAM, your laptop fan is screaming, and you can't find that one tab you opened 20 minutes ago.

I built Tabs in One to fix exactly that.

The problem

Chrome's tab bar is a horizontal strip. Once you have more than ~10 tabs, they shrink to tiny slivers. You lose track of what's open, duplicates pile up, and RAM climbs. Tab managers exist, but most of them either:

  • Add yet another sidebar that competes with your content, or
  • Require an account / subscription for basic features, or
  • Are abandoned.

What Tabs in One does

Tabs in One collects all your open tabs into one clean single-column page. When you trigger it, every open tab is moved to that page and the original tabs are closed — freeing RAM immediately. You can restore any tab (or all of them) back to normal tabs in one click, without losing anything.

Key features:

  • Single-column view — every tab as a readable row with title and URL, no more tiny favicons.
  • Restore in one click — bring tabs back individually or all at once.
  • Only unique links — if the manager page is already open, only new unique links are added. Nothing is lost, no duplicates.
  • Backups — automatic daily backup (last 5 kept), plus manual "back up now".
  • Export / Import — JSON or HTML, so you can move your tab list between machines.
  • Stats & ranks — tabs saved, RAM freed, personal record. Gamified ranks from "Neat Tabber" to "Final Boss of RAM".
  • Share your record — generate a shareable image + link.

How it works

  1. Click the Tabs in One icon (or use the context menu: "Open Tabs in One").
  2. All tabs move to one column page; originals close and RAM is freed.
  3. Browse, search, or restore whenever you want.

Permissions used: tabs, storage, contextMenus, alarms. No account, no subscription, no data leaves your browser.

Honest cons

  • It needs the tabs permission to read and manage tabs — that's the point, but some users are wary. The code is open to review.
  • If you rely on pinned tabs staying pinned, check the restore behavior first.
  • It's a tab manager, not a session sync tool — it won't sync across devices (use export/import for that).

Install

Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ehghdjiblhadojkedfjkmbeohiphogdb

Free. No account required.

Who it's for

  • Researchers and writers with 30+ reference tabs.
  • Developers juggling docs, Stack Overflow, and GitHub.
  • Anyone whose Chrome RAM usage makes their laptop fan scream.

Try it for a week. If it doesn't save you time, uninstall — zero cost.


Built with Chrome Manifest V3. Feedback welcome.

Top comments (0)