Reviews & Comments of FreshStart - Cross Browser Session Manager chrome extension

It appears others are correct. Crash Recovery is no longer auto-saving tabs and FreshStart only appears to work if you are manually saving tabs. It was a great extension but development has died. Sorry for those who never knew the usefulness of this extension.

As of Sep-2022 this app has ceased working and seemingly abandoned in the app store. Seems no updates are coming.. Pity this was a thorough and valid way to manage different browsing sessions and bookmark curation. It hasn't worked in Chrome and as others have mentioned, all the previous saved sessions and tabs are inaccessible within the app. Consider yourself lucky that Chrome > Bookmarks > FreshStart Sessions has a list of all the tabs that were saved in this app.

i had 200 tabs open, i closed it with another window open. problem was i lost all 200 tabs. and this thing couldn't restore it. luckily it had a list so i could click on each thing, but it loaded a black screen then crashed the browser.

I've been using this session manager for many years and it's been great! However, I'd love for it to be updated to support restoring 'tab groups' which is a relatively new feature in Chrome. It restores all my tabs fine, but the tab groupings are not maintained.

Works great, Would like it to keep the chrome groups that was made on the saved session

Awful. Crash recovery setting always turns off, so if you're not manually saving then you're f***ed.

You have to have the saved sessions inside "other bookmarks" if you try to move it your saves sessions will not appear in the extension anymore. I deleted other bookmarks thinking nothing was in there (because I don't put things there) and boom and my saved sessions gone nothing I can do. It made me scared all the sessions would just disappear without my permission so I don't want to use this extension anymore and will be looking for a better one.

Fantastic extension! I've been using it for years. It's so convenient to switch between various projects and private windows. Furthermore, saved me many times with CrashRecovery when I closed something accidentally and forgot about that. Thanks to the developers.

It's been 6 years since last updated, but FreshStart still does its job as one of the first reliable session management Chrome extensions. However, this extension does not support restoring Tab Groups. Restoring sessions, without Tab Groups, result in disorganized tabs. These restored tabs then need manual color and name reclassification into their respective Tab Groups. Google has listed the Tab Group API as working since Chrome v89: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/tabGroups/ A reliable tab management extension, such as FreshStart, would benefit greatly from being the first of its class to implement Chrome Tab Groups API. Everything else with this extension, works great, so this is a 5* review as soon as Tab Group restoration is implemented.

Worked at first, but quickly stopped working.. don't know why

Works great, exactly as advertised though id love an option to mass delete sessions from within the extension but there is a workaround. Go to bookmarks and open the Freshstart session folder, hold CTRL (or equivalent for mac) and click on all the sessions you want to delete.

Wonderful extension! It helps organize working and personal tab groups, switch between computers and several times rescued a lot of hours by Crash Recovery feature. Thanks to developers!

Needs a responsive GUI. If not all is rendered then the part non rendered is never available even with scroll. Horizontally. needs search

I have been using this extension for years. This time I installed it on Microsoft Edge and voila, all my saved sessions were available. I had been loving this extension but now it proved to be GRRRREAT

Today my data was no longer accessible, the small window did no longer open when clicking on the icon. Even when it did, there was no automatic save (I configured it), but when done by hand, at least that worked. Needed is also an option to enlarge that small window, especially on large screens it is near impossible to use.

Good concept. Serious flaws. Every time I open a session it loads all pages at the same time slowing down my computer and internet. I have a fast computer and fast internet connection, but loading dozens of tabs at the same time is too much, Another flaw is the fact that saving a session you have to type in the name, it will pick the wrong name automatically. You can see many duplicate sessions with the same name. You have to save manually, because autosave only does its job once every minute max.

Crash recovery constantly turning off, but when it's on, no sessions saved anyway.

Overall I like this extension and I use it more than a year now. I have over 100 sessions saved with it many of which consist of more than one window. I add up tabs to a certain session save it with the current date stamp and delete the old session. The only thing I'm missing is cross browser functionality and specifically to Firefox. As many have pointed out - this feature is missing. I'm an old fan of Firefox and now that it's back with speed and exceptional privacy protection I wanted to migrate ... problem. I could edit the imported bookmarks on Firefox but it would take too long. Notepadd++ won't help neither. Stuck. Pitty. I'll probably migrate and spend the time but then I'm never going to use FreshStart again for the trouble it caused me. Suggestion - Maybe you would like make FreshStart a kind of Open Source extension and have it a true cross browser solution. THIS would be great. Anyway - Thank you for all your effort !!!

was working well until it didn't and I lost all the saved sessions for the last 3 years. Wrote a message for the developer, but did not get a message back for the past 2 months. Gave up. good luck to others!

absolutely exceptional. thank you very much

the only thing i use this extension for is off by default: the crash recovery feature. when chrome updates, or even the extension itself, it switches back to off without telling me or asking if i want it on again by default. fix it please! at least add a feature to recognise what setting it was set to in the last session! i keep constantly losing dozens of tabs because of this!

Not really a "Cross Browser" tool. It only works with chrome. Would be great to have a firefox version. Besides from that though, this is an excellent session manager extension and is very useful since chrome has absolutely horrible session management which FreshStart rectifies. Only thing that concerns me is the lack of updates, but the extension continues to work (as of writing this). I have since switched to Session Buddy since (IMO) it has a better interface, although one thing it does lack is cloud syncing (storing session tabs in Bookmarks) which FreshStart does have. So, if cloud syncing is what you need, then FreshStart is the way to go. Other alternatives (there are a LOT of these): Toby for Chrome (or Toby Mini... I wouldn't trust a service that requires you to log into an external account), Tab Wrangler, Tabs Outliner, OneTab, Infinite Tabs Manager, Folderwise Bookmarks, TabHamster, Flowbar... Other useful extensions to use in combination with FreshStart: Tab Manager Plus

This has been a life saver so many times I can no longer count them. It has never failed to save my sessions and after each of numerous browser crashes restore my tabs. The built in tab restore feature fails most of the time which is why I went looking for this. What a great extension with lots of additional features to help you organize your sessions.

Crash recovery isn't saving every 5 min. In fact it is not saving continuously at all.

After install this extension, it deletes all my favorites and replaces with a blank FreshStart Sessions folder without notification or warnings...

I like it, but would be fine to have the tab list of a window collapsible, expandable. Also Collapse all, Expand all buttons would be useful!

Deceiving. I found it kinda restored a previous session, but lost all the history of individual tabs. Meaning on each tab there was no more option to click to go back or forward,

Much better than the others.. it can at least be edited.. the other do not allow editing and managing of the tabs in the windows.. this one does.. good job..

This crash recovery does not work. Every time it crashed on me, I check the extension and crash recovery has turned itself off and theres no tabs to restore. This makes it therefore useless. You can save a session fine, and restore that, but without a proper crash recovery what is the point.

keeps turning off crash recovery, useless when in need

If you could group sessions into folders and move sessions up and down the list it would be just perfect. That being said the fact that the sessions are saved as bookmarks is genius. My bookmarks are backed up to the "Google Cloud" and I don't have to worry about my information getting lost when my computer dies and I have to get new one.

Crashes when open 92 tabs - LOST ALL TABS. DOES NOT WORK ON ANY OTHER BROWSER - IT IS NOT "CROSS BROWSER" AS THEY CLAIM IT TO BE! YOU WILL GET STUCK AND TABS LOST LIKE ME!

This works most of the time, but sometimes when Chrome crashes the bookmark lists in the Crash Recovery feature are erased. Sometimes recently saved sessions disappear when Chrome is restarted.

The best.THANK YOU!

This would have been a 5 star review as I've been using Freshstart for some time now and it's made life a lot easier allowing me to group tabs for common subjects and open them all at once when researching various subjects. However, as of today it wont work anymore. Every time I try to open a group of tabs with it it crashes and seems to have been disabled in Chrome. Does anyone have any ideas as to why this is or what the fix is if indeed there is one? Update - Never mind, a reboot of the PC seems to have sorted it for now so it's now a full 5 stars again.

agressively insta opened my saved 500 tabs without any confirmation and my pc hangs for minutes...

this app doesnt track pointer movements which causes problems while clicking anywhere inside the extension

Works great, makes saving bookmarks for many tabs easy. Syncs just fine. Onæy problem I have had is when I had a computer where the Chrome sync was disabled, and then reenabled, for some reason it chose to update my bookmarks with the older copy from the computers that had sync enabled. Wish it had chosen to keep the most recent copy.

Too bad is abandon. :(

Nice and Great Work :)

I dont usually give 5 stars, ever, but this thing is perfect. *BIG* It ACTUALLY remembers the correct order the tabs were in correctly!! Can easily choose what windows/tabs you want (and edit them later).

Love it. Has saved me many times with its Crash Recovery feature. Very useful.

Initially got this for Chrome crash recovery because Chrome sometimes crashes but won't open up all the tabs in the last session. Now I use it mainly for being able to carry on where I left off on any computer connected to the internet - true hot-desking! So many other productivity benefits come with it too including being able to have a Chrome window with just the tabs relevant to a particular client and being able to bring up all the tabs in one hit by selecting the client's name form the list! I can't imagine life without it now! Sometimes it can be slow to sync but i'm not sure where the issue lies - it may not be with Freshstart.

The extension is okay. The only thing I think is missing is the ability to save the search history from the tabs. The only search history it saves is the one from the page that was saved. All this extension does is save the pages from the tabs. It does not save the search history from the tabs. In which case, I would not even call this a session manager. Instead, all it is is just another bookmark manager. I was really hyped up about this extension and I was really looking forward to using this, believing that it would be like Session Manager from Firefox (link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-manager/) and be able to save sessions on Close or when the computer shuts down abruptly. But then I found out that Session Manager does the same thing AND that it actually saves the search history from the tabs and adds it back to the Back and Forward buttons. Thus, this FreshStart is not a true session manager, but again, it is just another bookmark manager. Until the developers manage to make it save the search history from the tabs and add it back to the Back and Forward buttons, I think I will just stick with Firefox with now. And until the devs change it like Session Manager in Firefox, I think for now it should be named "FreshStart - Cross Browser Bookmark Manager", because that's really what it is and to say it is a session manager is very misleading. Very disappointing. Edit: I think I know why this extension won't and probably won't ever save tab history. I was googling "chrome session manager tab history" and found this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggkanocgddhmamlbiijnphhppkpkmkl?hl=en Apparently, "due to Chrome limitations, extensions cannot restore the history of reopened tabs." Overall, this extension is OK, if you just wanna save the windows/tabs/pages, but I need a real session manager, not a bookmark manager.

Great session manager. I use manually saved sessions all the time to save groups of pages that I'm using for research, etc. I love the ease of adding tabs to (or removing tabs from) a saved session. I also routinely rely on the crash recovery, either for actual crashes or for when my kids accidentally close all my windows or anything like that. Both the session saver and the crash recovery work perfectly for me, across multiple computers and three different operating systems. Seamless.

sorry, reduced to 4/5 stars and with a really STUBID issue about this one: if you press ctrl+shift+d then you can actually bookmark all the tabs in an window, so, ANY REASON IN PARTICULAR YOU MAKE THIS DEFAULT BEHAVIOR OF THIS EXTENSION ?!? and not (THIS IS WHY I INSTALLED THIS EXTENSION) all windows and all tabs (as it should) and it did happened to me to not pay enough attention, therefore TO LOSE WORK !!!! in sort: PLEASE MAKE DEFAULT CHECK ALL WINDOWS AND ALL TABS ! (and NOT only current window, we don't need your extension to save that !) thank you

Great tool... extremely helpful & useful utility... I have used it on 3 different computers with Vista, Win 7 & Win 10. The auto save function never works. Looks like the publisher has actually abandoned this, they don't to ever make an attempt to improve it. Last update was in Dec. 2012, 3 years back. A wise user will NEVER start depending/counting on this FREE utility. It can be turned off anytime & you will have nobody to help you.

I notice that recently it is failing to restore most of my tabs, either in my primary profile session or my alternate profile session. I have it set to save every 5 minutes. FreshStart appears to save only at the last time you had a graceful exit and nothing thereafter.

Works just great for me.

are you THIS STUPID FOR REAL ?!?!?!?!?!? really, AND I MEAN ****REALLY**** how can you justify "saving"session put by default ONLY ON CURRENT WINDOW ?!?!?!? why I'm so start up and why I scream about it ? ... be cuz YOU CAN DO THAT WITH CTRL+SHIFT+D, so, YOU DON'T NEED SOME EXTENSION TO PUT IN BOOKMARKS ALL TABS FROM A WINDOW therefore, (and IT DID HAPPENED TO ME) IF YOU DON'T PAY ATTENTION YOU CAN LOSE YOUR WHOLE WORK FIX THIS SHEET !!!!!

Seems to work after my first crash after install. I hope this addon only saves when it detects changes, it's an efficient method that 'Tab Backup & Recovery' used, but that addon stopped working with the recent Google Canary chrome versions.

Very Nice App easy to use but should support overwrite session with same name with current tab set.

Fantastic session management application. Best user experience compared to other available session manager applications (work done in minimum number of clicks as compared to other session managers). I found it to be better than the most popular session manager application - namely SessionBuddy

Doesn't save pinned tabs as being pinned. It unpins them.

Can not overwrite an existing session with current tabs set

This doesn't backup your sessions in a timely manner. I had it set to do so every 5 minutes, and yet the last snapshot is from 2 days ago! Setting the threshold lower seems to do nothing. The tab-saving feature is nice, but the session saver is broken. Look elsewhere for a better one.

must have, amazing and life saver extension.

Crash recovery was nearly 3 weeks old when I needed it. So much for saving every 5 minutes!

This has definitely saved my bacon a few times, but it's also made me angry by not automatically selecting all windows. It's for sessions, not for individual windows, so it should auto click "all windows." I believe I've lost some things because of that oversight. Sometimes I barely get to save a session before Chrome freaks out, and that ticker box is overlooked in a quick save.

Simply the best!

Best feature - Save sessions such that it can be recovered even if chrome ior even OS is reinstalled. (Actually it saves sessions in bookmarks (freshstartbookmarks) and we all know bookmarks are sync to google account so whenever you reinstall chrome in your OS and login with your google account, you get your bookmarks and then install this extension which automatically see this freshstartbookmarks and by this way you get your session even after you reinstall chrome or OS)

One of the best extensions ever!!! It syncs with google chrome so it doesn't matter what OS or machine I am on, all my saved sessions are right there. I never have to worry about re-installing an OS and loosing my sessions or having to back them up, when I sign into Chrome the first time there they are. Wonderful work!

nice!

Ever feel like you're getting lost between too many webpages, open tabs, and PDFs?? In the middle of a lit. review and I have 3 or 4 Chrome pages up and 65+ tabs and PDFs spread out between them. I was drowning in them because I was worried I would loose them if I didn't bookmark them properly. But who really wants 65+ bookmarks on student engagement hanging around?! This joint is the real deal - I can finally save and name a group of tabs (in order) and open them back up when I actually need to read and use them. A++

Simply awesome. For any chrome lover / Developers etc .... Thank you Dear for developing this.

Crash recovery isn't enabled by default so this is useless until you discover and fix this. Session Buddy can be installed and forgotten until you need it and THEN it does what you need without requiring setup or loosing sessions first.

Worked well. I have one sort of major issue though. However, I'm not sure if the author did this intentionally or not. The use case is I have a saved session from a day before. I've been doing some separate browsing with that session closed. I open a new window where I would like to restore the session. I open the session, but the session is restored in my previous window. This is unexpected but livable until I notice that all the other tabs I had open are closed. This to me makes this app not good. Once fixed this will be an awesome extension.

I use this extension all the time when I'm doing research for school. That way I don't have a ton of bookmarks I'll only need once.

I love this extension -- it's saved me a few major headache sessions -- but I haven't needed it in several months. Chrome (on both my Mac and my PC) hasn't crashed to the point where I couldn't restore the previous session or use Control+Shift+T repeatedly at startup to restore the previously open tabs, one by one. So I'm going to take the risk and uninstall it. You've served me well, FreshStart, but I think Chrome's growing pains of losing your entire previous session are probably history (terrible pun intended, of course).

nice browser

This is an awesome lifesaver. Saves you from the horrible circumstance of chrome crashing and losing all your tabs.

Really nice combination of automation and manual saves. Within 24-hr. of installing it, FreshStart saved me ! Indispensible. The DataRat

The best dang plugin! How do you live without it/??? :D It even does screenshots of the autosave sessions. #nuffsaid God bless you guys!

UI is not good but it supports synchronization and for this reason only i give thumbs up.

I am not a developer - YOU CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT THIS EXTENSION! FreshStart can recover from every sort of crash. Windows freeze, blue screen of death, Chrome Update, did you know that if Chrome version updates after your session of Chrome crashes, your tabs don't restore next session? Yes it's true! But not with FreshStart. If your settings are correct, Crash Recovery knows every time you open and close a tab, and keeps the most recent configuration, and several past tab configurations in it's memory, so you can always recover from a crash. I use 150-350 tabs in 2 windows at a time, and Crash Recovery remembers which tabs in which window in exact order they are located.

love it but you guys should add skins so we can change the appearance (texture and color) also an option to save the bookmarks to the bookmarks bar instead of "other bookmarks" because I don't use that folder anyway.

Im just loving it. It is simple, straightforward and helps you most and best than any other session manager, especially when it has the option to restore multiple windows with multiple tabs in it. THIS just this made me gave it 5 stars.

Using it for crash recovery only, which works very well. Haven't found any other extension that can do this!

Nice - but forces you to open saved tabs to a new window.. I'd really like an option to add them to the current window

This is one of my favorite extensions. I have things going back to early 2012 and it's amazing that I can find something I was working on a year ago and start right where I left off. (as long as the websites I saved are still around...)

I pin a certain amount of my tabs for every tab group I make. When I bring up a tab group though the pin information is not saved/loaded. Anyway to save pinned tabs and have them show as pins when a tab group is loaded?

Due to a recent update I no longer have the option to restore a previous browsing sessions, used to be an option at the bottom of Chrome. I am quite glad to have found this app, for it allows you to save the current window's tabs, and you can save multiple sessions.

Was 5 stars now it just crashes tried un-installing and re-installing. From Googling I suspect Google is at fault - it's too bad I've now lost access to hundreds of saved sessions

Excellent app. Useful time and again. I have never used the auto-save function, so I can't comment on that, but for someone like me, who regularly has 40+ tabs open, it can be a real lifesaver (for both my state of mind and my RAM) in periodically reducing the backlog of open tabs to a manageable level!

Now when click Options or the extension icon, it says Web Page not found. So, I've disabled it and most likely will uninstall it.

Chrome's auto-restore functionality often doesn't work - FreshStart's "Crash Recovery" is a lifesaver!

While most of these features can be done manually through bookmark folders and bookmark all tabs it does not allow for some quick customization like un-checking tabs you don't want to include and exporting sessions (aka a single bookmark folder).

Hi I rate this plug in 5 out 5 but can i ask could you also make a Firefox plug in to as my Google chrome is buggy when i click on the tab it closes so i am forced to use Firefox but their no plugin for Firefox like your one so please help me out and make one.

Great better than session buddy

Extremely useful when it works, but all too often it fails. I click its icon and a small empty box appears without any interface visible.

it's simple and the best :-)

after some trial and error, i've noticed this extension acts on FB. in that, as long as it's loaded, if you're logged into FB more than 5 minutes, you can't post statuses - it gets FB into thinking you're not logged in anymore or something.

This app is a Life Saver! One small inconvenience I have seen is -- If you keep adding links to a folder from different sessions (windows), and if you try to open the folder at a later point it seems to open them in N-windows. It would be nice to have an option to speficy whether we want a folder to be opened on a single window or multiple seperate windows. Otherwise this app is a Gem.

Only times it saves is when I choose to save. The auto-save has never worked for me. I was hoping to use the crash recovery as sometimes chrome loses my tabs after re-opening.

Really useful for storing work in progress when you have many streams of work on the go e.g. "Shop SATA drive" "Tom's art homework research"

awesome

This app is amazing, I can name and restore windows and tabs on command!!! I can finally manage the 40 or so tabs I always have open. Cannot believe I'm just downloading

Brilliant!

Excellent - especially the session recovery, since every browser with built-in crash recovery, except eLinks, has one time or another failed to properly restore session. Usually by starting like if you had closed all your tabs before exiting browser.

Always used. This should be a standard across all browsers!

My favourite plugin for Chrome. Rly.