Posted on Feb 09, 2012

A couple of weeks ago I wrote this haiku:

Thirty tabs had I
Closed the window, but not all
Now I have just one

A very common plight in our modern browser age, at least for those of us who are tab fiends. (I regularily have 20+ tabs open at a time and depend heavily on Firefox to remember what those tabs are)  Browser crashes, or more likely, you accidently close a browser window with all your tabs that you thought was the main one, but it wasn't, and now Firefox doesn't have a record of what you had open.  Painful.

Yes yes, I probably should not have that many tabs open in the first place, for issues of focus and productivity and "getting things done", and also for performance reasons, but let's ignore that for now.

Firefox Add-on Save My Tabs seeks to solve this problem in a very simple way.  Basically you set a time interval and a directory, and the add-on will spit out a simple text file that includes the windows, tab index, titles and the URLs of the tabs you currently have open in your session.  And that's it.  It's very simple and light weight, and it creates a history of stuff you're looking at.  I think the only way it could really be improved is by building an interface in Firefox that would allow you to browse and search through those files, but if you know your way around a text editor you could figure this out.

I had looked at other add-ons like Session Saver, which have tons of features, but were a bit overkill for me, and also required more active user intervention to save your session.  Save My Tabs is passive and just does its thing, and is then available for you to dive through when something goes bad.

So if you're a fiend for tabs like me, I highly recommend this add on. K, maybe it won't save your life, but it will save you a lot of frustration. :)

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Comments

wow

what a great post, just signed up to your RSS feed and hope to read more of your posts in the future. keep it up!