Reviews & Comments of TabFern tab manager and backup tool chrome extension

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?

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.

if only it could move with chromes UI and open / close with it then I'd use it.

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.

5 stars for being the best open source alternative to TO, which btw is not really maintained anymore.

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

What a great alternative to TO, thanks a lot for making and maintaining it!

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.

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 ;-)

very similar to, but not as good as Tabs Outliner due to inability to close tabs from the overview window.

★★★★★ 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.

excellent What make this extension better than others is ability to take a backup file and add it to chrome after new windows installation

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! :)

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.