How to import tabs from Chrome to Firefox and vice versa

[Karlston]

How to import tabs from Chrome to Firefox and vice versa

So, you have decided to switch from Chrome to Firefox, or maybe it's the other way around. The problem is you have a lot of tabs opened, and you can't abandon the session. Or, you use both web browsers regularly and want to push tabs from one browser to the other; this may also be useful for developers who need to test their sites in different browsers.

 

What do you do? Manually copy and paste each URL from one browser to the other? That could take a long while depending on the number of tabs that you want to push to the other browser.

 

The browser extension OneTab offers a solution that improves the process especially if you need to push multiple tabs to the other browser.

Things you will need:

• Firefox and Chrome
• OneTab extension for Firefox and Chrome.

Tip: you can check out our OneTab review for Chrome here.

How to import tabs from Chrome to Firefox and vice versa

Note: Please be advised that the following process will close all of your tabs and save the session to a list. But don't worry, you can restore the entire session just as easily.

 

1. Once you have installed the add-on, you should see its icon in the browser's toolbar.

 

2. Click on the button to open OneTab (this closes all open tabs)

 

3. Select the "Export/Import URLs" option on the right side of the page.

 

 

4. You should see an Import/Export tab that has a list of all the tabs that you had opened. It has the URL and web page title for each tab.

 

5. Copy this list to the clipboard.

 

6. Open Firefox and repeat steps 2 and 3.

 

7. Now you should be on the Import/Export tab. Paste the list of tabs from step 5 in the Import text field.

 

 

8. Click on the import button.

 

OneTab should open a new tab which displays the tabs that you just imported. Click on the "Restore all" option, and the add-on should open all the tabs at once. You can also choose to restore only the ones that you want, by clicking on the tab titles individually.

 

That's it. How simple was that? The process works the other way too, i.e., if you want to export tabs from Firefox to Chrome.

 

Note that it is theoretically also possible to send the list of exported URLs to a contact. May be useful to share research or let someone pick off where you stopped.

Another use for this method: Backup your sessions

I use this method for a different purpose. Over the course of a week or two, I accumulate several dozens of sites in tabs that I find interesting or have opened for future research purposes.

 

When I don't have the time to go through the list just yet but want to start fresh because the browser's tab bar gets convoluted, I use the extension to save the entire list of open sites in a text document.

 

You can use the import option to restore the tabs anytime you want to. You can even backup your session, clear the browser's data and cookies and restore the tabs right back. This has been helpful for me quite a few times over the past few years.

 

Note: OneTab hasn't been updated for a while on Chrome, but it still works perfectly. The Firefox version is updated frequently. There is an open source alternative for OneTab, called better-onetab, which I haven't used much since it was pulled and re-released by the developer.

 

This post was inspired by something I saw on reddit's Firefox sub yesterday. It was an interesting post, but they used the developer console to move tabs from Chrome to Firefox and it also involved using two different extensions which made it a slightly more complex method.

 

 

Source: How to import tabs from Chrome to Firefox and vice versa (gHacks)

[Marcus Thunder]

On 9/27/2019 at 10:14 PM, Karlston said:

I use this method for a different purpose. Over the course of a week or two, I accumulate several dozens of sites in tabs that I find interesting or have opened for future research purposes.

 

When I don't have the time to go through the list just yet but want to start fresh because the browser's tab bar gets convoluted, I use the extension to save the entire list of open sites in a text document.

Well I have stacked loads of text files with links and notes, but over the years I found it hard to search in txt files and find what I want.  I am looking for a way to separate notes, tutorials and links within txt files and tag them with for example date modified for easiear boolean search. I am not sure if i can use boolean in windows search function?

I am not sure if there is an application that can do that. I am not sure whether to try Bookmarks or Notes Applications?

[Karlston]

6 hours ago, Marcus Thunder said:

I am not sure if there is an application that can do that. I am not sure whether to try Bookmarks or Notes Applications?

 

FWIW, I've been using the free Google Keep to store useful text snippets and links. It allows creation of tags and adding them to notes.

 

I use it in both Windows and iOS.