An open, local-first replacement for Microsoft Edge Collections, which is being retired in Edge 149 (~June 2026). It's a small Manifest V3 browser extension for Chromium-based browsers: no account, no server, no build step. Your data stays in your browser.
Saving
- Side panel that mirrors the original Collections pane.
- Save the current page (with thumbnail, favicon and title) with one click,
or with the
Ctrl+Shift+Skeyboard shortcut (rebindable). - Right-click any page, link, or image → Save to Collections Plus ▸ pick a collection (or create a new one on the spot). Select text → Save selection as note.
- Add all open tabs in the window to a collection at once.
- Drag a link or image straight onto the panel to save it.
- Duplicate-aware: saving a page already in the collection is skipped.
- When a page has no preview image, a local screenshot is captured as the thumbnail.
Organizing
- Free-form notes; drag-and-drop reorder of both items and collections.
- Search across every collection (titles, URLs, notes, tags).
- Folders to group collections, pin favorites to the top, and tags (click a tag to filter).
- Checkboxes turn any collection into a checklist; custom fields (price, qty, SKU…) add structured data that flows into exports.
- Move or copy items between collections; undo deletes.
- Trash & Archive: deleting a collection or folder moves it to the Trash (restorable, and auto-emptied after 30 days), and you can Archive old collections to keep your main list uncluttered. Both are in the ⋯ menu.
- Custom covers: upload an image or promote a saved thumbnail with ★.
- Light / dark theme.
Exporting & backup
- Export to Excel as a real
.xlsxworkbook (one sheet per collection, clickable links) or as CSV, great for part lists, shopping lists, or anything you want to sort and total. - Export to Markdown or HTML, or copy a collection's links to the clipboard.
- Import your Edge export (
collections_export.csv) so your existing collections carry over on day one. - JSON backup (high fidelity: keeps notes, images, fields) and a local version history you can roll back to.
- Optional offline image caching so saved images survive link rot.
- Optional cross-device sync through a single file you keep in any cloud-synced folder (see Syncing across devices).
This is a standard Chromium Manifest V3 extension, so the core (context-menu
saving, storage, page capture, import/export) runs on any modern Chromium
browser. The catch is the Side Panel API (chrome.sidePanel), which hosts
the whole UI; its support varies:
| Browser | Side panel UI | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Google Chrome (114+) | ✅ Full | Verified. |
| Microsoft Edge (114+) | ✅ Full | Verified. |
| Brave | Panel opens but a known bug can dismiss it after ~1s. | |
| Vivaldi | Ships its own "Web Panels"; the standard API doesn't work. | |
| Opera | ❌ No | Doesn't implement the extension Side Panel API. |
| Arc / other Chromium | ➖ Likely | Should work if built on Chromium 114+ with the Side Panel API. |
In short: Chrome and Edge are the recommended, fully-tested targets. Other Chromium browsers may work depending on their Side Panel API support.
Collections Plus is live on the Chrome Web Store. Install it in one click and it auto-updates, with no manual reloading.
- Clone or download the repo from https://github.com/rod-trent/Collections-Plus.
- Open
edge://extensions(orchrome://extensions). - Turn on Developer mode (toggle, usually bottom-left or top-right).
- Click Load unpacked and select the project folder you just cloned.
- Pin the Collections Plus icon to the toolbar and click it to open the panel.
To update after pulling changes, click the reload ↻ button on the
extension's card in edge://extensions.
Ctrl+Shift+S saves the current page to the active collection. To change it,
open edge://extensions/shortcuts (or chrome://extensions/shortcuts)
and rebind "Save the current page to Collections Plus."
An unpacked extension does not auto-update; each browser keeps running the code it last loaded until you hit reload ↻ on its card. So whenever you pull new code (or apply a fix), reload the extension on every device, not just one. This matters especially for sync: a device still running older code can not only miss changes but also push with the old logic, so reload all of your devices around the same time after an update. Reloading only reloads the code: your collections and the sync file are untouched. (Publishing to the Chrome Web Store / Edge Add-ons would enable background auto-updates; until then, reloading per device is just how unpacked extensions work.)
Before Collections is removed, open the Collections pane in Edge and click
Export Your Data. Edge writes collections_export.csv to your Documents
folder. Then in this extension:
⋯ (top-right) → Import Edge CSV… → choose
collections_export.csv
The CSV only contains saved pages (Edge's export drops images and notes), so the import is pages-only. Going forward, use Export backup (JSON) for a complete backup.
Drag the ⠿ handle on a collection card to reorder your list, and the handle on an item to reorder it within a collection. The new order is saved instantly.
Every collection has a cover thumbnail (the first saved item by default). To change it:
- Open a collection and click Change cover… to upload your own image; it's downscaled and stored inline, so it always renders even if the original page goes offline.
- Or hover any saved page/image and click its ★ to promote that thumbnail to the cover.
- ⋯ → Remove cover clears it back to the default.
Two holding areas keep your main list tidy without losing anything. Both are reachable from the 📦 Archive and 🗑 Trash icons at the top of the panel (each shows a small count badge when it has something in it).
- Trash is for things you've deleted. The 🗑 button on a collection card — or ⋯ → Move to Trash inside a collection, or 🗑 on a folder header — moves it to the Trash instead of deleting it outright, with an Undo toast. From the Trash view you can Restore any entry, delete one permanently, or Empty Trash. Anything left in the Trash is permanently removed 30 days after it was deleted.
- Archive is for collections you want out of the way but intact. The 📦 button on a card (or ⋯ → Archive collection) moves a collection to the Archive; nothing there is ever auto-deleted. Restore brings it back to the top of your list.
- Deleting a folder sends it to the Trash too, and restoring it re-adopts its original collections (which fall back to the top level while it's trashed).
- Both Trash and Archive sync across devices and are included in JSON backups, just like your collections.
- ⋯ (top-right) → Export to Excel (CSV) exports every collection.
- Inside a collection, ⋯ → Export to Excel (CSV) exports just that one.
The file opens straight in Excel / Google Sheets / Numbers: one row per item, with columns Collection, Type, Title, URL, Note, Added. It's a UTF-8 CSV (with a BOM) so accented characters and emoji survive. Handy for part lists, shopping lists, research sources, or anything you want to sort, filter, or total in a spreadsheet.
Sync is optional and provider-agnostic: there's no account and no API keys.
Instead of integrating with one cloud (OneDrive vs. Google Drive vs. …), the
extension reads and writes a single collections-sync.json file that you
place inside a folder your computer already keeps synced: OneDrive, Google
Drive, Dropbox, iCloud Drive, etc. Your cloud client does the actual syncing;
the extension just keeps that one file up to date.
On your first device:
⋯ (top-right) → Create sync file… → save
collections-sync.jsoninside your synced folder.
On every other device:
⋯ (top-right) → Use existing sync file… → open the same
collections-sync.jsononce your cloud has finished downloading it.
The second step opens a normal Open dialog (not a save/overwrite prompt), the device adopts the synced data, and it asks for permission to write so its own future edits sync too.
Two simple operations run against that one file:
- Push: when you change anything, a moment later the extension writes your collections to the file. Your cloud client carries the file to your other devices.
- Pull: the extension reads the file back and adopts it if it changed. An open panel checks on focus, when it becomes visible again, and every ~20 seconds, so changes from another device show up on their own. Sync now and Pull from sync file force a push / pull immediately.
"Did the file change?" is decided by the file's modification time as this device sees it locally: the timestamp your own filesystem records when the cloud client drops in a new copy. Crucially, this does not depend on your two computers' clocks agreeing, so a change made on one machine can't be mistaken for "older" and skipped on another. (Earlier builds compared a clock value embedded by the writing device, which could silently drop changes when clocks drifted; that's fixed.)
Reconciliation is last-write-wins: whichever device writes the file last is the version everyone converges on. That's exactly right for one person moving between a laptop and a desktop. It is not built for two people (or two offline devices) editing the same collection at once: if you edit on two devices while both are offline, the one whose file syncs last wins and the other's un-synced edits are overwritten. So let the cloud catch up before editing elsewhere, and keep Export backup (JSON) as a guaranteed-complete snapshot.
When you connect a device to a file that already has data, it asks before doing anything destructive: load the file (replace this device's data) or overwrite the file with this device's data, so you can't accidentally clobber the good copy. And if a device has un-pushed local edits when the file changes elsewhere, it won't silently overwrite them; it keeps your changes and offers "Use file instead." The sync menu shows when you last synced, and a local version history (⋯ → Version history…) lets you roll back recent states.
Browsers don't keep the file's write permission across a restart or an extension reload (a security rule of the File System Access API). When that happens, Collections Plus pauses background saving instead of erroring: the sync menu shows Sync paused, and a toast offers Resume. Click Resume (or ⋯ → Resume sync / Sync now) once, approve the prompt, and your pending changes are written immediately and sync continues. Your data is never lost in the meantime; it's just held locally until you resume.
Requires a Chromium browser with the File System Access API (Chrome/Edge have it). If it's unavailable, the sync menu says so and the rest of the extension works unchanged.
Everything is stored locally via chrome.storage.local on your machine.
Nothing is sent to us or any server; the optional sync file lives in a folder
you chose, and only your own cloud client touches it. Saved page/image
thumbnails are stored as references to their original URLs (not copied), so they
display as long as the source stays online; uploaded covers, captured
screenshots, and cached images are downscaled and stored inline so they
always render. Offline image caching and cross-device sync are both off until
you turn them on.
manifest.json MV3 manifest (+ keyboard command)
background.js service worker: side panel, context menus, shortcut
sidepanel/ panel.html / panel.css / panel.js (the UI)
lib/store.js data layer (chrome.storage.local), schema, settings, history
lib/csv.js tolerant CSV parser + Edge-export mapper (pure, testable)
lib/export.js collections → CSV + .xlsx sheet structures (pure, testable)
lib/render.js collections → Markdown / HTML / link list (pure, testable)
lib/xlsx.js dependency-free .xlsx writer (pure, testable)
lib/image.js downscale a file/URL/screenshot into a small data URL
lib/sync.js optional synced-file sync (File System Access API)
icons/ generated PNG icons
tools/make_icons.py regenerate the icons
tools/test_*.mjs pure-logic test harnesses (no browser needed)
fixtures/ sample Edge CSV for testing the importer
- No build step: edit files and hit reload on the extension card.
- Run the pure-logic tests without a browser:
npm test # csv import, csv/xlsx export, render, store/migrate - Regenerate icons:
python tools/make_icons.py - Build a Chrome Web Store / Edge Add-ons upload ZIP (runtime files only):
npm run package # → dist/collections-plus-<version>.zip
To submit to the Chrome Web Store or Edge Add-ons, run npm run package to build
the upload ZIP and npm run images to generate the listing graphics into
store-assets/. The extension's privacy policy is local-first:
nothing is collected or transmitted. (The local-only submission notes, with
listing copy and per-permission justifications, live in
docs/CHROME_WEB_STORE.md, which is gitignored.)
MIT © Rod Trent. Use it, fork it, improve it.
- Bulk multi-select of items (move/copy/delete several at once).
- Full-text search ranking and per-collection search.
- An Edge Add-ons listing (already live on the Chrome Web Store).