Chrome Extensions Our Tech Editor Uses to Manage a Messy Browser
I am the worst at organizing my browser – the worst. I open tabs like adding items to my to-do list and then forget about them for weeks as more of their peers join the penthouse party above Chrome’s address bar.
There are many extensions that you can use to manage any kind of organizational … difficulties … with Chrome. Here are a few of them that I use to keep my sanity.
Great Lift
We’ve written about this miracle before (actually twice ), but The Great Suspender is one of the best browser extensions I’ve ever installed. I have a pretty impressive gaming computer though – 16GB of storage! Go crazy! – I found that having more than 20 tabs open in the background of my browser can sometimes slow it down scanning or otherwise mess up Chrome in some disastrous way.
In The Great Suspender, you set a time limit, say 15 minutes. If you haven’t touched a specific browser tab during this time, The Great Suspender does exactly what its name suggests: puts tabs into a kind of “standby” mode, ensuring they don’t take up extra memory in your browser. What’s more, the extension hides those tabs a bit so you don’t lose sight of the multiple tabs you actually use among the vast sea of open sites.
OneTab
I love the OneTab concept. I installed it with no problem and it works absolutely fine. The only thing I hesitate to use it more than I already do, albeit sparingly, is that its premise – combining all your open tabs into one tab with a simple list of links – makes them easier to forget. … But this is my business, not OneTab. If you let it work for you, this extension offers the perfect way to take more control over your messy browsing habits.
Session buddy
Chrome sometimes crashes. And sometimes it crashes in such a weird way that its typical sentence “you want to restore the tabs that were open before I made the mess” doesn’t work at all. It doesn’t really matter if you have one or two tabs that you used; if you have 20 or more of them, you will have to dig into your history to find out who they all were.
Session buddy saved my bacon more times than I can count. It takes just a few clicks to restore old browser sessions – like the one that worked great right before Chrome went crazy. The extension even lists all the websites that are in each of the saved sessions to help you make sure you are restoring the correct package of tabs.
View of the Earth from Google Earth
When you open your 35th tab of the day in one browser window, sometimes it’s just nice to have something pretty to look at. Google Earth Earth – the longest name for an extension for basic functionality – shows you a new image from Google Earth whenever you open a new tab. Think of it as a Zen moment in Chrome.