Manage Multiple Browser Tabs With This Chrome Extension
If you do all your work in a browser, you can see dozens of tabs in one window. You can open new windows for different projects and rearrange the tabs, or develop monastic discipline to stop opening tabs. Or you can practically manage them by treating your browser as an operating system. The Workona Chrome extension organizes your tabs into named windows that you can easily switch between and save for later. It looks like a tricky version of Chrome’s bookmarking and sorting functionality. And it saves you from overloading your tabs without penalizing it.
Respect your tabs
We’ve provided many extensions to help you deal with tab congestion, but many of them try to “fix” the habit of opening too many tabs. Workona’s first premise is that it is okay, even smart , to use many tabs ; the real problem is that Chrome didn’t give you a nice interface to manage those tabs. And unlike the similar extension Toby , Workona treats your tabs more like an active work area than an archive.
The second premise of Workona is that you can split tabs into sets . I recently had 18 tabs open, which seemed cumbersome to me, but it wasn’t that crazy: I had five open tabs to buy socks, three tabs to handle insurance, ten tabs to research articles, and a few “miscellaneous” ones. “With Workona, I can split these tabs into different work areas, and everything becomes more manageable.
Workona’s main interface is a pinned tab that sticks to all sessions of your browser. It displays your open tabs as well as your saved sets of tabs in a new interface that looks a lot like Google Drive. You can click on different work areas and all relevant tabs will load in the background. (Your pinned tabs remain pinned.) You can drag tabs from one workspace to another. And you can save tabs to your workspace to serve as your bookmarks folder.
While the relationship between the Workona interface and your actual browser session may seem confusing at first, it works so intuitively that you’ll figure it out in a couple of minutes. You drag tab titles, such as document titles, to sort by work area, or click the + button to save them as a set of bookmarks. And since you can read the full title of each tab, it will be easier for you to understand what you are doing. (According to creator Quinn Morgan, background tabs are temporarily frozen to save memory.)
You may already be using multiple windows and bookmark sets in Chrome. But Google hasn’t updated these features in years, and they seem clunky. Dragging and dropping a tab in Chrome is like taking a screaming kid out of a party, and bookmarks are made for long-term storage rather than constant shuffling. Workona integrates and optimizes both while respecting your workflow.
Get used to the workflow
It’s weird to combine tabs with bookmarks. Workona workspaces are linked to Chrome windows; its search is linked to the history of your browser. But saved tabs are not associated with Chrome bookmarks. I’m still getting used to seeing tabs and bookmarks as two parts of the same process and find out what disappears when I close the workspace.
If you take tabs out of the way, you can forget them. If you’re the type of person who only decides what is immediately visible, you can rely on the stress of overloading tabs to get the job done. But so far, I’ve found myself returning to jobs when I need them. And since the free version of Workona only gives me 10 jobs, there is a limit to how much clutter I can create. (The upcoming pro version includes unlimited jobs for $ 6 a month.)
Once you find yourself in Workona, you will find yourself inside . As a Chrome extension, it is behind all your browsing sessions (data never leaves your computer). There is really no “off” mode unless you disable the extension. I love this because whenever I have too many tabs open, Workona is always there, waiting for me to deal with myself. But when I only have a couple of tabs open, this extra pinned tab can be a little annoying. I also don’t like the fact that Workona is taking over my “new tab” page.
If you use the same Chrome profile on multiple computers, Workona will automatically load on all of them, just like any extension. This allows you to sync your browser sessions across all your computers, which is useful if you change devices frequently or sometimes work from home. But if you like keeping strict boundaries between work and home life, you probably use different Chrome profiles on different computers, so (like any extension) Workona will stick to the computer you installed it on.
If you want to get rid of Workona, you can disable or remove the extension, close the windows and you are free. He won’t leave his hooks everywhere. After removing the extensions that flooded my Gmail with specialized shortcuts, it was a big relief.
Share your tabs
Just like Google Docs allows you to share documents, Workona allows you to share tabs with other Workona users. You can share a set of saved tabs for each user to open privately, or you can share which tabs you have opened in real time for a synced browsing session. This is more active than linking to each other for messaging, but less aggressive than screen sharing. This is useful for things like comparing purchases with your partner or researching a group project.
The caveat is that all participants need to install Workona. This means that everyone uses this extension or disables it at the end of the shared session. You can’t just email your tabs to someone or use Workona as a web application without an extension. So it’s only worth getting everyone involved if they’re experimental geeks like you, or if you’re hoping to leverage it in the long run.
Boomerang, Lifehacker’s favorite email extension, adds all of the time-shifting features that should be bundled with Gmail. Workona adds tab management features that should be bundled with Chrome. Hopefully Workona will grow and develop like Boomerang. Because I ended up waiting for Chrome to add these features by itself.