Getting tabs under control
Let’s try out some systems and see what works
How many tabs do you have open on your web browser right now? I usually have around 15 to 20: websites that I use frequently, such as email and various tracking systems and sites I need for my magazine work — and there’s always some sites that I’ve opened up, maybe months ago, and never closed. I mean to do something with that information but never quite get to it. And when I’m doing research on a topic, then there might be 35 to 50 tabs open, or more, as I try to get a handle on everything.
I know that for some, that’s child’s play. But recently I decided to do something about these tabs. And the bookmark manager in Chrome wasn’t adequate. For me, bookmarks seem to be where websites get lost rather than organized. I need a system.
(If bookmarks work for you, though, check out this March story from Endgadget. It’s full of tips and tricks for organizing your tabs in whatever browser you use.)
The situation: I have about 40 tabs open on my work laptop and another 16 on the laptop I use for my freelance and personal work. I also have a couple dozen emails with results from an ongoing automated Google search for The Systematic Scribe. I opened up all those sites and added another 20 or so tabs to my to-be-organized list.
As I tackled these tabs, I tried about half a dozen different apps and Chrome extensions, but there’s only three that came close to what I needed (with one clear winner).
OneTab: This extension works for Chrome, Edge, Safari or Firefox. Once installed, OneTab lets you click once and have all your tabs disappear into a single list so you can see what’s in all those tabs. When you need a tab, you can easily restore it. You can drag and drop items in the list to organize them. And your pinned tabs should not disappear into the list.
But I didn’t like that I couldn’t seem to label those groups of tabs. And having the tabs disappear when OneTab made its list really put me off. I knew the tabs hadn’t disappeared entirely, but it felt like they had.
Tabs Outliner: This Chrome extension creates a new window where all of your open tabs are listed, but your tabs all still stay open. You can just use the list to navigate to all of your tabs, rather than clicking on the tabs themselves, and the extension recommends you do this. But you can also relabel your tabs (pencil icon), close the tab but keep it in your tree (X icon) or use the trash can to delete the tab. Drag and drop to organize your tabs, including opening those tabs in new windows. I also found several lists of tabs from recent computer crashes (my work laptop has some issues). Chrome had restored the tabs each time, but I can see this feature being useful for when restoration doesn’t happen.
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Workona: Workona — which works on Chrome, Firefox and Edge — lets you organize your tabs into dedicated, labeled spaces. The site requires that you sign up for an account. I’m using a free account, which will at some point max out on the number of spaces, but Workona is not clear on what that number is (the one big disappointment). If you want unlimited spaces, you’ll need to pay $7/month, more if you want to be able to collaborate and share spaces or use other features, such as connecting to Asana.
As soon as I started using Workona, I was asked to sort my open tabs into spaces. I initially created two, and as soon as I moved links into each space, they disappeared from my open tabs. When I was done, Workona listed all these tabs in a tree. If I clicked on a space, a window opened with just those tabs and my other window with everything else disappeared. But clicking in the tree got them back. (This wasn’t ideal, but now that I know it will happen, I can be more careful about what I’m opening.)
While Workona has been a bit more fiddly than I might like, one great benefit is that I can have this extension on both of my laptops, save and organize tabs in it, and then access everything no matter which computer I’m using.
My winner: Workona. But if all you want to do is see what those hundred tabs are that you have open, I’d probably go with Tabs Outliner.
Do you have a favorite tool to organize your tabs? Comment on this post or send me an email so I can share with the group.
Next time: Some organizing help from the 34th president of the United States.
— Sarah
P.S. If you’ve got a question, comment or idea for a future newsletter, please email me at sciwriter.sarah@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you. And if someone forwarded this to you (hint, hint), check out my first post and what you can expect from The Systematic Scribe.