TabsPack packs every open tab into one small file, and puts them back exactly as they were:
the same windows, the same order, the same pinned tabs, the same groups. In the same browser,
or a different one.
Free on the Chrome Web Store, which Edge and other Chromium
browsers can install from too. Edge Add-ons and Firefox Add-ons follow; until then the Firefox build
is on the releases page.
Chrome, Edge and Firefox Your tabs never leave your device No account, no sync, no tracking Open, documented file format
Why anyone needs this
A browser is a terrible place to keep something important.
Everything you are in the middle of lives in a row of tabs that any one of these can take away.
You have too many to close
Ninety tabs, and every one of them is the only record that you were going to read it. Closing
the window costs something real, so the window never closes, and the machine pays for it all day.
You are moving browsers
A new laptop, a work profile, Chrome to Firefox. Bookmarks come across and the session does not:
the windows, the order and the pinned tabs, which is the part you actually had in your head.
Something took them away
A crash, an update, an extension you installed that was later delisted and left every tab parked
behind its own page. Restore-last-session is one click deep and one chance wide.
What it does
Everything comes back, not just the addresses.
Most exporters give you a list of links. A list of links is not a session. TabsPack keeps the shape.
Windows, order and pinned tabs
Three windows come back as three windows, in the order you had them, with the pinned tabs
pinned and the active tab active. Position and size too.
Tab groups, with their names
Titles, colours and whether a group was collapsed. TabsPack asks for the tab groups permission
before you export, because that is where a group's name is lost if it does not.
Two hundred tabs, asleep
Restored tabs open unloaded: title and address in the strip, nothing running behind them.
A pack of 200 real pages restores in about nine seconds and leaves 199 of them asleep.
It unwraps suspended tabs
Suspenders park your tab on their own page and hide the real address inside it, which no other
browser can reopen. TabsPack reads it back out, on export and on import, and counts them for you.
Snapshots, without a file
Name the session and keep it inside the extension for the days you do not want to think about
where a file goes. Snapshots survive a restart, and they are still only on this machine.
It shows you which ones died
TabsPack groups your open tabs by when you last looked at them, and can leave anything untouched
for a month or a year out of the export, so you can archive it and close it. A pinned tab is never
called old, and a tab your browser gives no date for is counted apart and never dropped.
Keyboard, not menus
Alt + Shift + E exports everything,
Alt + Shift + D this window,
Alt + Shift + S saves a snapshot. The toolbar icon tells you it worked.
A crash does not cost you your tabs
From version 1.1.0: a recovery copy of your open tabs and your last five sessions, kept on this
machine. If the browser crashes or starts without them, TabsPack says how many are missing and
shows them to you first. Automatic snapshots skip the times nothing changed and keep the newest ten.
See what you export, and untick
From version 1.1.0 the export pane shows the tabs the file will hold, as the same tree the import
preview uses. Untick a tab and it is left out, and the report says how many you left out.
How it works
Three clicks out, three clicks back.
Pack them
Open TabsPack, choose this window or all of them, and press Export. You get one
.tabspack.json file, named with the date, in your downloads folder.
Take it anywhere
Email it, drop it in a repository, put it on a stick. It is a small text file and it has no
secrets in it: no cookies, no tokens, nothing that could sign in as you.
Unpack them
In any browser with TabsPack, drop the file in. You see exactly what is about to open before
anything opens, then press Restore and your session is back.
Privacy
Your tabs never leave this device.
Not as a policy. As a property of the build: TabsPack asks for no host permission when you
install it, so out of the box it cannot reach any address on the internet at all.
No account and no sync. There is nothing to sign in to, so there is nothing of yours anywhere to sign in to.
No analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting. Nothing counts what you do, because nothing is watching.
No page access. No content script is injected anywhere, so TabsPack cannot read or change a page even if it wanted to.
An export cannot log in as you. A pack holds addresses, titles and structure. Never cookies, tokens, headers or form data. That is written into the format specification, not left to the implementation.
One request exists, and you make it. Pressing Send in the Support pane sends the message you wrote. Your browser asks first, declining is fine, and nothing about your tabs is in it.
The build refuses to compile if anyone adds a network call. scripts/lint.mjs fails
on fetch, XMLHttpRequest, EventSource,
WebSocket or importScripts anywhere in the source, with one named
exception: the eighty lines that send a support message and nothing else.
It also fails on any remote script, font, stylesheet or image. Everything TabsPack loads comes
out of the package you installed.
Compatibility
It reads what you already have.
You do not have to have been using TabsPack for TabsPack to be useful. Drop in the file your old
extension gave you.
Formats TabsPack can import, and what survives from each
Where it came from
Addresses
Titles
Windows
Groups
TabsPack .tabspack.json
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
OneTab export
Yes
Yes
Yes
None in the file
Session Buddy, JSON and CSV
Yes
Yes
Yes
None in the file
Tab Session Manager
Yes
Yes
Yes
None in the file
Browser bookmarks, Netscape HTML
Yes
Yes
Folders become windows
None in the file
A plain list of URLs
Yes
No
No
No
Markdown links, or flat JSON
Yes
Yes
No
No
TabsPack works out which of these a file is by reading it, not by its extension, and it tells you
what it found before it opens a single tab. Anything it cannot use is named in the report rather
than dropped in silence.
The file
A format you can read without us.
A .tabspack.json file is ordinary JSON against a published schema. Open it in a
text editor. Diff two of them. Keep one in a repository next to the project it belongs to.
Write a script that generates one.
The point is that your session is not locked inside an extension that might be delisted next
year. That has happened to a lot of people, and it is most of the reason this exists.
TabsPack also exports a plain list of addresses, a flat JSON file and a CSV when that is what
the next tool needs, and it tells you in the interface exactly what each of those loses.
No. It asks for no host permission when you install it, so it cannot reach any address on the
internet. Your tabs are read only when you ask for an export, and they are written to a file on
your own machine. The one request TabsPack can ever make is a support message you write
yourself and press Send on, and your browser asks your permission before that happens.
Can I move my tabs from Chrome to Firefox?
Yes, and back again. Windows, tab order and pinned tabs come back everywhere. Tab groups come
back in the browsers that have them; where they do not exist the tabs are restored without the
grouping, and TabsPack says so rather than quietly dropping something.
Will restoring 200 tabs bring my computer to its knees?
No. Restored tabs open asleep: they are in the strip with their title and address, and they load
nothing until you click one. A measured restore of 200 real pages takes about nine seconds and
leaves 199 of them unloaded. You can turn that off if you would rather they all load.
What about tabs held by a suspender extension?
TabsPack unwraps them. Suspenders park a tab on their own page and hide the true address inside
it, which is useless anywhere else and worse than useless if the suspender is ever delisted.
TabsPack reads the real address back out, on export and on import, and tells you how many it
found.
Is it really free? What is the catch?
It is free, there is no paid tier, there is no account, and there is nothing to sell because
nothing is collected. It is published under the MIT licence and the source is on GitHub. See
pricing for the longer answer, including why it is free.
Can I read the file without the extension?
Yes. It is JSON with a published schema. A text editor opens it, a script can read it, and
git diff tells you what changed between two of them.
Does it work with private or incognito windows?
Private windows are left out of exports by default, and TabsPack cannot see them at all unless
you explicitly allow it in private mode in your browser's own settings and switch the option on
inside TabsPack. Two deliberate steps, because the default should be the careful one.
What happens to a tab I cannot reopen, like a settings page?
Browsers refuse to let an extension open their own internal pages. TabsPack keeps those
addresses in the file so nothing is lost, and on restore it opens a page listing the ones it was
not allowed to open, so you can click them yourself.
TabsPack
