Manage Your Tab-Hoarding With This Chrome Extension

Tabs can multiply and get out of hand quickly -- sucking up precious CPU resources and making it virtually impossible to find what you want in your browser. Tame your crowded, disorganized browser window with OneTab.
Nice and tidy. Photo Josh ValcarcelWIRED
Nice and tidy.Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Tab counts can quickly get out of hand--sucking up precious CPU resources and making it virtually impossible to find those Winter Olympic wipeout GIFs. Well, we've got an easy solution for you.

The OneTab extension for Chrome (a FireFox version supposedly is on the way) lets you continue your tab-hoarding ways, but in a more productive, less processor-intensive way. The extension consolidates all the open tabs in your browser into a single tab with a list of those other pages. It essentially creates a bookmark page of what you're doing on the internet right now--or what you have been doing over the past week or month. You can use this single list to access and restore the tabs individually or simultaneously. You also can use it to get rid of tabs you no longer need.

To install the extension, simply go to the OneTab page. After you've downloaded the extension, you'll see a blue funnel icon in your Chrome Browser's extension field to the right of the URL field. Click on the icon whenever your window is overwhelmed with tabs and, presto, you're done.

The bookmark page OneTab creates is easier to navigate, with the titles of each page to the right of the tab's icon. Click on the headline to restore a tab. Or, if you require all the tabs reappear, click on Restore All at the top of the list of tabs.

OneTab also saves groups of tabs for later use. Once you're done with one, just click on "Delete all" at the top of a group. Tab groups can also be named, locked, and shared. Suddenly having 50 tabs of Jennifer Lawrence rolling her eyes doesn't seem so bad.