TabCollector

A browser extension that collects a list of open tabs, then closes them to save resources.

Example Use Cases

• Online Shopping - Collect a list of products for later review
• YouTube - Collect a list of videos, without having to sign in with a Google account and make a playlist
• Save Resources - Even when your tabs are in the background, they are still using your computer's resources. I am sure we are all aware of the "Chrome memory hog" issue. However, the tab collection is just a single, static page that does no further processing once loaded and uses very little memory. This can be very helpful for computers with limited RAM, by effectively hibernating the websites and removing their resource consumption. You could even save the collection URL and close the browser all together, then reopen the collection when you need to access the links.

Tip

The tab collection URL can be shared with other people with the TabCollector extension and they can view those lists. This is a quick and handy way to share a lot of links, rather than copy-pasting each one into an email or message. This even works offline, since all of the processing is done locally on your browser.

Screenshots

Installation

Important

Distributables will not be generated anymore starting v1.4, since they require signing from the vendor's extension store. Any distributables from previous releases will not work. The distributables will be replaced by zips of the /building/build/* folders for each browser.

Chrome

1. Download the latest release and extract
2. Open chrome://extensions
3. Enable Developer Mode
4. Click Load unpacked
5. Provide the extracted folder

Firefox

Firefox doesn't allow unverified extensions, unless you want to use temporary mode. That means you have to re-install the extension every time you start the browser. Until there is a signed release, it will be unuseable on Firefox for normal users until it is signed.

However, there is a workaround:

1. Clone the repo
2. Install Mozilla's web-ext tool
3. Run cd building && bash 1-build.sh to build the extension (or use the zipped
4. Run cd build/firefox && web-ext run to launch Firefox with the extension installed
5. (optional) Link Firefox to that command: nano ~/.bashrc and add alias firefox='cd PATH_TO_REPO/building/build/firefox && web-ext run'
6. ^ Now you can launch Firefox (with the extension installed) simply by running firefox in the terminal

Other Browsers

If you would like to see this extension in another browser, please open an issue with the [FEATURE] tag. While I am in the process of sorting out the Chrome and Firefox signing, further browser support is on hold, but please do open the issue so we can evaluate it in the future.

Feedback

Please share any thoughts in the v1 Feedback Discussion.

Bug Reporting

• Please share any bugs or errors you experience in an issue with the [BUG] tag.
• Please include your browser, browser version, and extension version.
• Please search the open and closed issues to help avoid creating duplicates.
• If built from source, please use the latest commit of main and include the commit hash in the issue body.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the following projects and websites:

• jQuery - DOM manipulation and helpful utilities
• LESS - CSS precompiler
• svgrepo - Open-license SVG icons
• svgcrop - Remove empty space around SVGs

Contributors

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for information on contributing to this repository.

Thank you very much to everyone that contributes to this project.