(Guide/Review) Tabs Aside is a Firefox extension that lets you save and restore browser sessions

[Karlston]

Tabs Aside is a Firefox extension that lets you save and restore browser sessions

Microsoft Edge (not the Chromium one) has a cool feature that lets you set tabs aside. Basically, it saves your session and lets you restore it at a later time.

 

 

Tabs Aside is a web extension that can do the same for Firefox. The add-on needs to be setup before it can be used for the purpose.

 

 

Click on the toolbar icon to get started. A side-panel opens and the setup wizard explains how the add-on works. Tabs Aside saves tabs as bookmarks in its folder. Every session is saved in its own sub-folder. You may choose to create a new folder called 'Tabs Aside' or create a custom folder.

 

 

The next step in the wizard lets you choose the session saving behavior. You can pick from three options. The default setting is "Active Sessions" that updates bookmarks as you open or close tabs, and each session is saved it is own window.

 

The "Tabs Aside 2" method disables Windowed mode. Or you can choose the "Like Microsoft Edge" option, that disables both Windowed mode and Active Sessions.

 

Note: The current iteration of the extension is called Tabs Aside 3 on GitHub.

How to set aside tabs in Tabs Aside

Click on the toolbar icon, it has three options. Select the Tabs Aside option, it opens a new window and begins saving each tab to the session. When it's done, a side-panel opens on the left edge of the screen. This is the "Tabs you've set aside panel", technically it's the bookmark folder's title.

 

Note: If you have a lot of tabs, you may notice a slight delay in the process.

 

 

Let's call this sidebar the sessions panel, because this is where you can view, restore or search sessions. Select the restore option next to a session, and Tabs Aside opens a new window and restores your tabs. It uses lazy loading (only loads the first tab), so don't worry about the browser or the add-on using up too much memory or slowing down the browser while tabs are loading.

 

 

Sessions that you've saved remain even after you have restored them (since they are saved as bookmarks). Clicking the three dot menu next to a session lets you rename or remove the session. Click on the arrow icon in the left edge of the screen. This makes the add-on list all tabs that were set aside during the selected session. The list displays the title of each tab.  You may click on a title to switch to the corresponding tab. Right-click on a listing to copy it's URL to the clipboard.

 

 

Once you've named a session, it's title will also be displayed in the toolbar icon's menu.

 

Options Page

The Tabs Aside settings allows you set the session's root folder, enable or disable Active Sessions, open sessions in a new window, lazy loading. You can change the way tab closing behavior is handled: remove from session or set aside. The add-on does not set aside pinned tabs by default, but there is an option that lets it save pinned tabs.

 

 

I was looking for a OneTab replacement (hasn't been updated in months, and I wanted an alternative just in case) and stumbled across Better OneTab which sadly doesn't have a Firefox version. So, I continued my search and eventually found Tabs Aside. The extension is open source.

 

Landing Page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabs-aside/

 

 

Source: Tabs Aside is a Firefox extension that lets you save and restore browser sessions (gHacks - Ashwin)