Tabitt — Tab Snapshots & Restore

Tabitt's single purpose: take periodic and on-demand snapshots of the user's open tabs and windows, and restore them. You know the moment. Chrome quits, or updates, or you close the wrong window — and the forty tabs you had been assembling all afternoon are gone. Chrome's own session restore covers the easy case, and when it works Tabitt says nothing at all. This is for the other case: when Chrome comes back with a different session than the one you had, when the crash was two sessions ago, or when the layout you actually want is the one you had at 09:40 on Tuesday. Tabitt records your windows and tabs every few minutes and keeps a timeline of them. When you need one back, you pick it from a list and press a button. ** What it saves • Every normal window: its tabs in order, its size and position on screen, and whether it was maximized. • Pinned tabs, pinned again in the right places. • Tab groups, with their name, their colour, and whether they were collapsed. • Which tab was active, and which window was in front. • Never incognito windows. Not as a setting you can turn on — Tabitt discards them unconditionally, and its replace modes will not close one either. ** A timeline you can actually use • A snapshot every hour by default, anywhere from 1 minute to 4 hours. • An identical layout is not saved twice. If nothing changed since the last check, the existing snapshot is simply marked still current — so "keep the last 25" means a day of genuinely different layouts, not two hours of the same one. • Snapshot now, from the popup or with Alt+Shift+N, before you do something risky. • Manual snapshots and anything you mark Keep are never deleted automatically. Not by the rotation, not by the size limit. Automatic housekeeping quietly destroying something you saved on purpose is the failure this kind of extension is known for, and it cannot happen here. • Name them, so "the tabs for the audit" is findable in a week. ** Restore exactly as much as you want • The whole snapshot, one window from it, or a single tab. • Filter 200 tabs by title or address first, and open just the one you were looking for. • Restoring never closes anything. Every restore opens alongside what you already have, so the worst a restore can do is give you too many tabs. • Replacing is a second, separate step. Ask for Replace this window or Replace everything and the restore still opens alongside; when it has finished, the report offers a button to close the tabs you had before. You decide with the restored tabs in front of you, having seen that they really did come back. Tabitt saves a "Before restore" snapshot first, the close only ever touches tabs that were already open when the restore began, and it never touches an incognito window. • Restoring a very large session? From 40 tabs up, Tabitt offers to open them unloaded — real tabs with the right titles that only load the page when you click them, so recovering 200 tabs does not run your browser out of memory during the recovery. ** It tells you the truth about what happened • After a restore: how many tabs opened, how long it took, and every tab that could not be reopened — with Chrome's own reason, grouped so you get one line per reason instead of forty. One button copies all the addresses. • Undo closes the tabs Tabitt just opened. • When Chrome comes back after a crash, Tabitt compares what is open against its newest snapshot. If Chrome restored the session itself, nothing happens. If it did not, the popup offers to put the tabs back. • A storage meter that reports what Chrome actually has on disk, not an estimate — and a visible warning on the toolbar when the limit is reached, with a note saying which lever to pull, rather than snapshots quietly no longer being saved. ** Yours, on your machine • No host permissions. No network requests of any kind. No analytics, no telemetry, no account, and no server — including the developer's. • Nothing syncs. What you record on this machine stays on this machine. • Snapshots are stored locally and are deleted with the extension when you uninstall it. • It does record the web addresses of your open tabs, which is browsing history, and the listing says so. It writes them to your disk and nowhere else. • Export any snapshot as a plain JSON file, and import one back. That file is a readable list of your addresses, so treat it the way you would treat a copy of your browser history. ** Worth knowing before you install • Manifest V3 gives an extension no shutdown warning at all, so Tabitt cannot take a last-second snapshot as Chrome dies. A hard crash costs you at most one interval — an hour at the default. Shorten the interval, or take a manual snapshot, when it matters. • Scroll position, form contents and back/forward history cannot be restored by any extension. Chrome does not expose them. A restored tab is a fresh load of that address. • A tab restored unloaded shows a Tabitt address in the address bar until you click it, and goes blank if you remove Tabitt while it is still unloaded. • Most chrome:// pages do reopen, despite the common belief; a few refuse, and which ones depends on your Chrome version. Tabitt attempts them and reports exactly what Chrome said. • An interrupted restore that resumes can open a handful of duplicate tabs — Chrome offers no way to create a tab exactly once. Tabitt tells you when that has happened rather than printing a count it cannot stand behind. Built from scratch for Manifest V3. No frameworks, no runtime dependencies, no tracking. Works on Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi and other Chromium browsers (Chrome 111 or newer). Open source, MIT licensed: https://github.com/ptmplop/Tabitt