extension ExtPose

TabFern tab manager and backup tool

CRX id

hbajjpcdbninabigakflkhiogmmjaakm-

Description from extension meta

Save and restore your tabs and windows, and navigate tabs in a vertical view.

Image from store TabFern tab manager and backup tool
Description from store TabFern organizes your browsing life. It shows all your open windows and tabs in one place, for immediate access. With one click, you can close a window, and then bring it back any time with one more click. With two clicks, you can backup all those URLs to a text file, or restore a backup. No need to login to copy browsing sessions between computers! With TabFern, switching between projects is a breeze, and you can leave a task behind without worrying about losing the pages. TabFern is perfect for researchers, the perpetually curious, and anyone who winds up with way too many tabs open at once! TabFern is under active development, so please do not hesitate to report bugs or provide feedback via GitHub. TabFern is offered AS-IS, and with NO WARRANTY — see the license on the Web site for full details. However, the primary author uses TabFern almost 365 days a year, so bug reports should receive a quick response :) . If you would like to contribute to TabFern's development, feel free — we welcome pull requests and would be happy to help you get started. Permissions: The "Read your browsing history" permission permits TabFern to access the URLs and titles of pages you visit, so that it can help you manage your tabs. TabFern stores that data only on your computer, and does not send it anywhere. TabFern is inspired by the Tabs Outliner extension by Vladyslav Volovyk. However, TabFern is a completely separate extension, and is not affiliated with Tabs Outliner or with Vladyslav in any way.

Latest reviews

  • (2023-09-21) Lúcia Maria de Souza: Minhas guias e janelas, simplesmente, desapareceram. Perdi todas, com esta extensão.
  • (2023-03-12) Ladia Zhang: 非常好用 要是能出个类似edge新出的垂直标签那种侧边栏模式就好了 因为想全屏浏览时直接可以点击 不得不配一个窗口置顶的外置插件
  • (2022-10-07) bane banely: I would really love to try this. Unfortunately nothing happens when clicking the extension icon...Not even if I right click and open it from that menu. In fact, I cant even get the extensions options to load! just says loading... what gives?
  • (2022-09-06) Timothy Cahill: I use this extension many times every day. It is a natural for organizing readings and projects, and it is indispensable for computer memory management. I have worked with most of the tab/bookmark knowledge-management extensions, and this is the one I keep coming back to.
  • (2022-08-22) Stephen S: if only it could move with chromes UI and open / close with it then I'd use it.
  • (2022-04-25) Xalomon: When trying to restore a backup of a lot of tabs they all will be loaded in memory and make Chrome crash, unlike recently closed that loads them suspended and doesn't have this problem.
  • (2022-02-07) Jaekyeom Kim (Jaekyeom Kim): 5 stars for being the best open source alternative to TO, which btw is not really maintained anymore.
  • (2021-08-31) r w: Please offer keyboard shortcut such as Alt+T to load the tab list. Besides, please offer two columns tab list optionally for wide screen desktop.
  • (2021-07-21) 寒木钓萌: 这是一个我可能要使用10年的插件,特别好用,超过市面上所有一切。
  • (2021-04-12) James Chase: This tool is amazing and underrated! I used Tabs Outliner for a long time and that has it's benefits too but the ability to easily name and open/close windows in Chrome with Tab Fern means you can basically do what Chrome *should* do which is keep your idle windows from using all your system resources. Just open a named window "session" when you want to research those thing. What made me switch in the first place though was the ability to easily backup the open windows and tabs to a local file and then re-load this file on another computer -- so you can easily transfer your browser state for those of us that work at companies that block tools that use cloud storage like Chrome's synchronization.
  • (2021-04-02) Jenny Williams: Hi Chris, agree with all the above, well done again on the work here. As with many TO users, when moving to new PC's and moving the TO database, we need to reload TO, which is now gone. Any chance you could add a read of TO databases into TF? Instant 80% TO>TF migration it could be :)
  • (2021-03-22) Jeff State: This is one of the few session management extensions that appears to remain active development. However, this extension does not support restoring Tab Groups. Restoring sessions results in disorganized tabs, which then need reclassifying into Tab Groups. Google has listed the Tab Group API as working since Chrome v89: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/tabGroups/ My hope that an actively-developed extension, like TabFern can now use Chrome's Tab Groups API to get it implemented. Everything else with this extension, works great, so this is a 5* review as soon as Tab Group restoration is implemented.
  • (2020-08-15) Michael Baekboel: This is a very nice extension - I use it daily to mange my mad-tab-life. It needs a couple of features: 1) The Window Name should appear on the group of tabs 2) The ability to color each set of tabs when you create the name Both features to quickly - at a glance - know which group the user is looking at when switching between each set of tabs, I probably have anywhere between 30 and 50 set up as I organize them by project etc.
  • (2020-07-24) Hikari Shidou: I had used it for a day and it's really impressive. It's the third best and most flexible tabs manager I've ever experienced. I loved how it saves backup on json format, this way I'm able to manually create backups of single windows. I'm willing to donate if you keep it open source and implement support for tree tabs structure and/or per-tab hibernation, similar to how Tabs Outliner works.
  • (2020-07-19) Elite Stone Design: I've been looking for a replacement for Tabs Outliner and this is the best contender so far. I wish there was a similar addon for FireFox but so far nothing as simple or as elegant.
  • (2020-03-26) László Krencz: I love it, came from Tabs Outliner. Love the simplicity and ease of use and the clean interface. Would love to donate a few bucks but so far haven't found a way :)
  • (2019-11-26) Máté Rémiás: What a great alternative to TO, thanks a lot for making and maintaining it!
  • (2019-06-13) Fidel Perez: Excelent. Simple yet very powerful. Wont have a browser open without TabFern also open again! Thanks for creating this and for doing it open source.
  • (2019-06-12) Sergio D: I just opened chrome and it showed me and empty tab. I tried with TabFern and it restored a backup from last month... so it's basically useless.
  • (2019-01-26) Mike G: It's basic and straightforward in it's functionality but by periodically saving to a cloud drive it has a) saved my (figurative) bacon after many MacOS and Win10 crashes and b) allows me to pick up research where I left off from any other system. In fact automating those tab snapshots periodically is about the only thing I really miss (hint hint ;-)
  • (2018-08-09) Acer Aspire: С пользователем "Виктор-Оксана Андрушко" Не согласен. У меня Slimjet. При нажатии на значок расширения его всплывающее окно открывается во весь экран(монитор),НЕ удобно конечно,но через... несколько секунд (когда прогрузится всё сохранённое) окно принимает ранее заданные размеры. На Alt+Tab реакции расширения никакой Нет. Уважаемый разработчик,прикрути пожалуйста русский язык! Там же ж Не много надо(Dear developer, please tie the Russian language! In the same place Not much :) ;) ).
  • (2018-07-08) Виктор-Оксана Рушко: куча недостатков и глюков.. Во первых меняет свой размер почти каждый раз, задолбался двигать подстраивать размер хрома под панель. Во вторых через алт+таб видим. ТОже задолбался переключатся все время на него попадая.
  • (2018-04-11) Garreth Tinsley: very similar to, but not as good as Tabs Outliner due to inability to close tabs from the overview window.
  • (2018-01-14) Dixie Normous: ★★★★★ 5 stars alone just for undertaking this much work and effort into a solution to our tab hell in chrome :) AND on github too! Also looks like it could be a potential replacement/alternative for some of Session Buddy's features. I'm happy to see a tab manager inspired by TabsOutliner since I really did like that extension until I realized how horrible the licensing and support was. ("license" invalidated after first time I synced chrome to another device, 2yrs later still not fixed.) The author for that one got a lot of things right but so much wrong. Hopefully this will be a viable alternative to TabsOutliner without the licensing nonsense and annoying interface stuffs mentioned in another review. I'd much rather donate to a FOSS project than purchase a license for someones buggy obfuscated code. Maybe eventually a donation system could be put in place if one doesn't already exist. I'll follow up and edit this review as I use it more.
  • (2018-01-02) pre wall: excellent What make this extension better than others is ability to take a backup file and add it to chrome after new windows installation
  • (2017-10-15) LateNightHacks (LNH): SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!! :D ok, maybe a bit too early for that, this still needs some work to adequately replace TO, but you are on the right track! Things I liked: - smaller tools overlay looks good - no annoying ad banner - proper setting page (looks great, just need more stuff in there :) ) - interface is clean and functional - it's much faster and less buggy Things I would really love to see: (even just as options for advance users) - option to open tabs on double click instead of single click - only open the tab clicked on, not the whole tree - a tree structure like the one on TO with the vertical lines and horizontal lines, it was quite helpful to be able to see the hierarchy - more compact design perhaps smaller or different fonts option and smaller icons (I suppose I could just zoom out the page but that doesn't do a clean job) - is it possible to make the scrollbar even narrower? (or just not show it at all while still keeping the page scrollable?) - customisation for the tab links representation (Loaded/unloaded/selected - option to see the memory usage of tabs next to their icon would be sweet I'll be running this side by side TO till TF catches up to TO. GO TF! :)
  • (2017-10-14) Aleksei Kasilov: Лучшее расширение которое я на текущий момент нашёл для своих задач (перебирал их десятки). Отлично подходит для организации структурирования окон и вкладок, например, по проектам. Простое и отличное расширение выполняющее свои функции сохранения окон и вкладок в них в удобном структурированном виде.
  • (2017-09-27) Anton Chupin: One feature is crucially needed: saving of history of browsing in a tab.
  • (2017-09-07) Extremely basic compared to the venerable Tabs Outliner. BUT: It does not nag about paying - it supports backups to local disk - and top of all that it is *much* faster and no bugs. It's a keeper! Since TO is unusable these days, I gave TabFern a go. TabFern works magnificently and I immediately disabled the unusably buggy mess that is TO. I hope more features will come, for example: - Actual hierarchy of tabs (it only does 1 level currently). - Ability to move tabs between groups and/or restore a single tab (currently if a window with 50 tab is closed and you want to restore just 1, you cannot, need to open whole window with all tabs). - The extension icon/button shows no data, could show number of windows/tabs open/saved. - A single-click of a closed tab opens the whole window, if it is a window with 50 tabs you'll be slow for a while. - I'd rather have tab titles truncated to TabFern window width instead of a horizontal scrollbar. I hope the developer keeps at it. With the way TO is going we really need a better tab manager and this could be it.

Latest issues

  • (2021-04-12, v:0.2.1) James Chase: Ability to move multiple tabs
    Hi! I love the product. One thing that would make it even more awesome is that sometime I need to bulk move maybe 10 tabs open in the same window to a new window. If it were possible to somehow select multiple tabs instead of dragging them one by one within the tool that would save a lot of time doing this. Thanks for your effort on this tool, I love it!
  • (2020-12-06, v:0.2.1) George Timke: Using on iPhones
    Can I access the chrome extension tabfern on my iPhone or does it only work on a computer?
  • (2020-11-03, v:0.2.1) Hikari Shidou: Donation
    I've been using TabFern for a few months and it's great. I'd like to make a donation but found no reference for it. While I don't learn to develop chromium extensions to help work on it, I'd like to pay u a beer!
  • (2020-08-28, v:0.2.1) Sombody Elses: Open just one tab
    I may be overlooking something but is there a way to open just one tab once you have things organized? When I click on a tab the entire set of tabs opens up in a new window. I'd like to be able to open just one tab at a time, or all tabs, depending on what I'm doing at the moment.
  • (2019-09-17, v:0.2.0) Whiskey Hammer: Bugged
    Bugged. The Tab Fern window would not appear. The icon is present and clickable in the taskbar but the window would never appear. I used the hotkey for window max, and window snap and nothing happened. No biggie let's just repair the add on I said. Whoops no repair option. Okay, nbd, lets just uninstall and reinstall. That worked! Wait.... wait where are all my saved tab? Gone. They're gone. All the data I built is gone because your add-on crashed and prevented me from saving a backup, and you're too short sighted to actually build in some kind of recovery mechanism. Thanks for inviting me to trust your add on and letting me down.
  • (2019-08-08, v:0.2.0) Georgios Diamantopoulos: After computer shutting down unexpectedly I lost my saved tabs :(
    Is there any way to recover them???
  • (2018-11-16, v:0.1.19) Terrn Lister: Hierarchical sorting/grouping.
    I noticed you mentioned that it is a limitation, and that you can only have two levels. I am wondering why, and if you can ever overcome this limitation. Seriously, this is the only feature I am looking for! Nothing seems to have it.
  • (2018-06-25, v:0.1.16) Incognito windows
    May I suggest to put a notice somewhere on the settings window, to warning users that if they want their incognito windows to appear in the list, they need to allow the extension in incognito.
  • (2018-04-15, v:0.1.16) Ismo R: For Firefox?
    Hi, I'm stuck with Tabs Outliner - I just cannot organize my work flow without it any longer. However, I loathe Chrome. I now use Vivaldi, but that browser is still too unreliable for serious work. So, there really are no good choices for me at the moment. However, Firefox is blazing fast these days. And it used to be my first choice. Could you please consider porting this TabFern project to Firefox in the near future, as well? Wishing you all the best with your enterprise!
  • (2018-02-11, v:0.1.15) Thunder God (Thor): Keep it up
    Happy to see someone has come out with an alternative to Tab Outliner. I now know why this alternative exists... I paid for the paid features of tab outliner and formatted/reinstalled windows only to have tab outliner lose access to paid features despite logging in with the same email. My support requests to the author have gone unanswered for more than 2 months now. So thank you for creating a decent alternative people like me can use...and thank you for making it open source on github. My only suggestion is keep up the great work! I look forward to future updates.
  • (2017-11-06, v:0.1.12 ALPHA - YMMV) Add saved tabs Search feature
    Just tried TabFern. If you ever used the Firefox bookmark manager - it is a good example of what a 'bookmark' type search should be. I think it would be a good feature for all users if you allowed for multiple word fragments to search on at the same time. Example: If I have a lot of tabs related to fractals, I might want only the tabs that have the word fragment "frac" AND the word fragment "julia" in the title. An exact phrase search would be useless - it would not allow me to find "fractal" or "fractals" or "fractalytic" AND "julia" or "juliaset" AND "math". I would like to just enter "frac julia math" into search and have it (by default) find all tabs with ALL of those word fragments (in any order) in their title. Likewise, it would be good to have an OR search operator also (capital "OR" or vertical bar "|" or caret "^" etc.) so that the search would find all tabs with ANY of my search word fragments (in any order) in their titles. You might also get a little more complex with your search function with something like: "frac [mandle OR julia] [math OR equation]" (If you were having a really good day - [grin]) Thanks for listening.
  • (2017-11-06, v:0.1.12 ALPHA - YMMV) Site Icons in Saved Windows
    Just tried TabFern. I saved a window, closed TabFern, and reopened TabFern - none of the saved tabs show icons. With no icons, I am unable to 'quickly' determine if a saved window has the sites that I am looking for in it. Since TabFern has no search capability, I think that saving and displaying the sites' icons would be very helpful. Thanks for listening.

Statistics

Installs
1,733 history
Category
Rating
4.1 (40 votes)
Last update / version
2022-12-26 / 0.3.1
Listing languages
de en fr ru

Links