I’m the kind of person who often has a lot of tabs open. A lot. Right now, the count is somewhere north of 50, all of them in Chrome.

Not surprisingly, that’s slowing things down. And since I’d switched to Chrome a year ago or so because I was finding Safari slow, and I’d switched to Safari because I’d found Firefox slow, naturally I wondered if the latest version of Firefox would be any faster.
The answer is yes, it’s snappier and seems to be more stable, and I may well switch to it for a while.
But that’s another story. This is the story of how the process of discovering that led me to a powerful browser tool.

Wanted: extension that will let me move a slew of open tabs from one browser to another.
RobCottingham
July 7, 2011
That tweet led to a very sensible suggestion:
@RobCottingham No need for a extension on Chrome: Ctrl+clic and drag your tabs from a browser to an other. On Firefox: http://t.co/bfIu6sI
yohannh
July 7, 2011
That works wonderfully, and would be the perfect solution except…
@yohannh Thanks, I’ll do that if I have to! But I have 53 open tabs at the moment. :)
RobCottingham
July 7, 2011
Then along came Laura Rogers with a brilliant one-word suggestion:
@RobCottingham TabCloud?
laurarodgers
July 7, 2011

TabCloud is “a browser tab and session manager which allows you to save groups of open tabs to access later or on another device.”

Operative phrase: “on another device.” While Chrome (like recent versions of some other browsers) allows you to do things like bookmark all of your open tabs and recall them later, TabCloud allows you to store that list of tabs online, using an account you authenticate with your Google Profile.

Then, later on, you can reload that list of tabs… in the same browser, or in another browser, or even on a completely different computer. (TabCloud works with Chrome and Firefox, and also comes as an Android app.) You just need to be able to authenticate again.

If there’s one limitation, it’s that you can’t publish those collections of tabs so anyone could load them with one click. But this is still a mighty handy tool.

For instance, I can easily imagine having a few suites of tabs that would be useful for presentations, client demos, keynotes or trainings. Being able to load them up anywhere I could get my hands on a copy of Chrome or Firefox (provided I could also install the TabCloud add-on) could be a huge timesaver.

Let me know if you’ve taken TabCloud for a spin, or if you’ve come across anything similar (especially if it’s useful for the Safari/Internet Explorer crowd).

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