
Show HN: Tabbie, a tab manager for Google Chrome - hharnisch
https://github.com/hharnisc/tabbie
======
aviraldg
I use Toby ([https://www.gettoby.com/](https://www.gettoby.com/)) for this and
it's simply brilliant*

*Add The Great Suspender ([https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender](https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender)) if you have a tab-hoarding problem

~~~
calvano915
I find Tab Snooze ([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-
snooze/pdiebia...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-
snooze/pdiebiamhaleloakpcgmpnenggpjbcbm?hl=en)) to be better for my tab
hoarding needs. I feel that if I wanted to organize all my tabs I would just
use bookmarks to do so rather than Toby. With Tab Snooze, tabs will
automatically recall themselves on a set schedule - once or recurring - or
"someday" randomly which is fun. I did install Great Suspender which will also
help me a lot.

~~~
swah
Nice - would be super interesting if I could snooze at work and open at home!

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johndoe4589
Thoughts:

* Super simpe, I like it

* Nice colorful icon easy to spot

suggestions

* save all tabs by default, I honestly never even heard you could "select" tabs (ctrl click) and never used it until I found out it wasnt working and tried ctrl clicking tabs before saving them. Even after learning it I think it's a hassle for me to do that extra step. Logically speaking a session is all the tabs, I don't see how selecting tabs to save is the main use case but maybe I'm the odd one.

* Some way to replace tabs instead of opening a window. I like to keep my window centered, and unfortunately a new window is always shifted from the default position, and then if I close that one last, my windows never open in the same spot. Maybe a checkbox " replace tabs in active window" (or some general setting that won't need to be in the popup)

~~~
hharnisch
Awesome feedback here! Starting to see some patterns on what people expect it
to do. Going to fix some of this today and post an update

~~~
luckman212
Great work! My suggestions (in order of importance):

* if there is >1 selected tab, change button behavior to "save selected tabs" else default to "save all tabs"

* a simple "cancel/destroy" prompt before deleting a tab group - if you are a pinboard.in user, the way maciej handles this is very nice

* show tab count in parens next to each saved group e.g. "jenkins (7)"

* search/filter box at top to quickly find tab groups

~~~
hharnisch
These are cool! Have already pushed out a fix for the first one. There's a
toggle checkbox now for that. I've added your feedback here:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/139IKt9Y_ubvLnU3ITLHH...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/139IKt9Y_ubvLnU3ITLHHdb3svNCt0mBd4Cy5UnpYk0A/edit#gid=0).
Thanks so much!

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primigenus
Hey Harrison!

Wow, mind blown: the popup says "save selected tabs", which made me ask the
question "what do you mean, _selected_ tabs? I only have one tab at a time?",
followed by experimentally shift/cmd-clicking tabs in the current window, and
resulting in abovementioned mindblow.

------
antonycourtney
Hmmm, this seems like a minimalist version of my tab manager, Tabli:
[http://www.gettabli.com](http://www.gettabli.com)

Tabli is based on a similar concept (being able to save sets of tabs with a
meaningful name), but is a full-featured tab manager, allowing you to see all
open tabs, switch between tabs, and revert to last saved version of a tab set.

What's the roadmap / vision for Tabbie and how does it differ from Tabli?

(To OP: If the projects seem similar enough in spirit and you'd be interested
in combining forces and collaborating on Tabli, please let me know!)

~~~
lunelson
Tabli looks great. Curiously, it doesn't mention that it syncs across
computers; but looking at the docs I notice that it uses a folder inside
Chrome's Bookmarks, so I guess you also get syncing for free—looking forward
to testing it

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erepsin
Can I suggest you describe it as "save your Chrome tabs" or something similar?
Instead of "tab manager", "manager" being a sometimes over-used and hard to
define word.

~~~
mcv
It's unclear to me in what way this lets me manage my tabs. I expect an easily
browseable overview of all my tabs (because they don't fit in the tab bar
anymore), and the ability to do stuff with them. Saving them for later use is
absolutely an interesting option, but for some reason the screenshots show a
cat, rather than a list of all my tabs.

How does the cat help in managing 200 tabs?

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rly_ItsMe
Atm I use Session Buddy for that purpose what makes Tabbie different/ better
to it?

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diimdeep
I use [https://www.one-tab.com](https://www.one-tab.com) and
[https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender](https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender)

p.s. There is so much good links get submitted to HN combined with all that
information noise this getting to homepage ? Yeah, forced. Yes, this is really
sad. p.p.s. Noting personal to this particular username, just general feeling
about HN.

~~~
AdamGibbins
I too use One Tab, its great. However the one downside is it doesn't sync so I
had to manually export all my tabs before reinstalling the other day. They
make this easy, but it's a bit of an annoyance when I'm so used to having
everything in browsers synced with the cloud nowadays.

------
lobster_johnson
I wrote this in another discussion:

For years my wishlist item has been a project manager that can treat a single
window as a project. A bit like a stateful, window-oriented
Delicious/Pinboard.

For example, say I'm looking for a sofa to buy. I might open the ones I like
in a bunch of tabs to mull over. However, if I'm at work, I'd like to just
close the window. Since the project manager has associated the window with a
project, I can just close the window. Later, I select "Sofa hunting" from the
Projects menu and off I go with the same set of tabs. If I change the tabs and
close the window again, the project is automatically updated -- no need to
explicitly save.

I'd go one step further: Think of the project as a "pile of bookmarks" where
the visible set of tabs is a subset of all bookmarked tabs. For example, say I
find a nice sofa. I add it to the pile and close the tab. The project now
includes that URL, but it won't open a tab for it unless I go into the project
browser and find it there and open it. So this disassociates the tab from the
bookmark, but retains the "working set" that is my project session. Similar to
how an IDE or editor might preserve which files I have open, but still
maintain my entire project.

There are some extensions out there that do similar things, but don't get the
ergonomics right. There's a couple of "session managers", but they are dumb:
You "load" a session, and then "save" it. Changing the window doesn't
automatically update the session, and closing the window destroys your
session. Safari also lets you bookmark a bunch of tabs as a folder and reopen
them again, but there's no link between the folder and the open window.

I haven't tried this extension, but on first glance it looks to me like it
makes the same mistake as other tab managers? I.e. you have to manually "save"
and "load" named sessions?

------
johndoe4589
Somewhat related:

I want a simple clean page like Safari's Favorites on iOS, with just beautiful
icons (using high dpi mobile icons instead of the favicon), a simple label.
Able to drag/drop to organize them however I like on a simple grid. That's all
I need.

Is there an extension to do that? A beautiful grid of icons, clean, no fuss ?

Safari's Favorites on iOS is just great. I tend to use it as a "reading list"
so I don't have to deal with the bookmarks for temporary things, and also for
permanent sites I visit often.

The only thing I'd improve over Safari's Favorites (iOS) is to show a subtle
grid when you start dragging items, and to allow user to leave empty blocks in
the grid. That way you can personalize even more by arranging icons in groups
(kinda like windows desktop icons with "align icons to grid").

~~~
hharnisch
Curious how that would work in chrome, would you drag in individual tab into
the chrome extension?

~~~
johndoe4589
The behaviour can be in line with desktop.. ie. click extension to get a
choice to add current page to "favorites" (assuming extension manages the new
tab as well, which is where the shortcut would go). Only when in the new tab
page, I'd allow drag and drop of the icons.

It's pretty nutty to think just how crude the Google Chrome default tab page
is. I'm not sure why it is that way. I don't think the page screenshot is that
much helpful. Some sites look good and the thumb is pretty recognizable,
others are relatively random.

Actually, I wonder if an extension can pull the "apple-touch-icon-precomposed"
hi dpi icons in the meta tags?

------
AhmedElGamil
Cool stuff. Been search quite a bit recently on Chrome for something that
resembles Firefox's Panorama ([https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-
groups-removal](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-removal)),
later available as an add-on ([https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/tab-
groups-panorama...](https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/tab-groups-
panorama/)). I've yet to find anything like it where with a key-combination
you can get a visual Exposé-like grouping of your tabs.

------
yilugurlu
What do they gonna do with my page view statistics? Why everyone have to
poison a useful tool with Analytics tracking code. If it's about to provide
some usage statistics, sure they can ask and collect my usage data
anonymously. But why GA?

~~~
hharnisch
The short answer is GA because it's free and allows for collecting events. I
wasn't sure how people would use the app so I wanted to measure a few events.
One specific question I had at the beginning was "would people want to save
and close tabs". The answer so far is yes they do, but only 15% of the time.
Not sure if that means to keep or remove the feature yet though :D

A snapshot of the data I'm collecting
[https://cl.ly/0Y0h0s1N3t0K](https://cl.ly/0Y0h0s1N3t0K)

------
ivanche
I would recommend to write much more informative README file so your potential
audience would know what to expect from this extension. These look like good
resources: [https://www.ctl.io/developers/blog/post/how-to-write-a-
readm...](https://www.ctl.io/developers/blog/post/how-to-write-a-readme-worth-
reading) and [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2304863/how-to-write-a-
go...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2304863/how-to-write-a-good-readme)

------
bangonkeyboard
For Safari, use Sessions ([https://sessions-
extension.github.io/Sessions/](https://sessions-
extension.github.io/Sessions/)).

------
pps
There is also Spaces, not maintained, but it works flawlessly for me in
multiple environments (it was broken for some time in Vivaldi, but now it
works again)
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/spaces/cenkmofngpo...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/spaces/cenkmofngpohdnkbjdpilgpmbiiljjim)

------
robk
Works nicely. However note that you should explain CTRL on Windows, not CMD
button to select. Also might want to make the highlighted tabs a bit higher
contrast when CTRL-clicking as I didn't really notice at first. For usability
maybe make them swap to inverse color or something more bold to convey
selection.

~~~
ago
I think the multi tab selection is not part of the extension, but is
integrated in Chrome itself. I recently discovered it by accident and found it
to be super helpful to do things like splitting a group of tabs into a new
window.

------
fiatjaf
Does it sync?

~~~
hharnisch
Current implementation uses the local chrome storage api
(chrome.storage.local). Could probably swap that out for the sync api
(chrome.storage.sync). Haven't tried that yet though
[https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/storage#type-
Storage...](https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/storage#type-StorageArea)

~~~
thecloud
switching to sync storage is very easy as all api calls should be identical.
just remember that the maximum size for stored objects is lower in sync
storage (only 8mb I believe)

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c0da
I love your logo :D

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oblio
It's nice but I can't help but think of the limitations of Chrome extension
APIs. All these Chrome tab managers put together probably only do 50% of what
Tab Mix Plus does for Firefox :(

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kmfrk
Doesn't seem to have an option to add tabs to existing sessions. I take it the
workflow for this requires you to open the session and re-save it with the
remaining tabs?

------
curiousgal
The question is, can it sync across devices? (Linux/Windows) I've been looking
for a FOS alternative to TabCloud.

~~~
robk
He says yes downthread - it now uses chrome.storage which syncs automatically.

------
roryisok
Cool, I might try and port this to opera!

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didibus
I've been using FreshStart for that for years, but I like that this one is
open source.

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euph0ria
How secure is it to use these types of extensions? Are they able to sniff all
my logins etc?

~~~
detaro
If you are worried if the installed-through-the-store version is the same so
you could just unpack it and compare with the code release. Or pack that
yourself and install it, but updates through the store should at least prompt
you when the extension asks for more permissions than it currently has.

The current permissions can be seen in the manifest:
[https://github.com/hharnisc/tabbie/blob/master/manifest.json](https://github.com/hharnisc/tabbie/blob/master/manifest.json)

The extension can store data (synced if you are logged in to chrome), get
metadata about and manipulate your tabs (including the URL, which might be
security-relevant), and can call Google Analytics.

~~~
euph0ria
Thank you! Exactly the type of answer I was looking for.

------
andrewingram
Are there any tab managers that intelligently group tabs together by
type/topic?

