Chris Collins

Tools · everyday

Tab sets

Turn the tabs open in Chrome into a shareable link — drag tabs or bookmarks in, paste them, or load Chrome's bookmarks export, no extension needed — then edit titles, notes, a group name and colour, and re-share or open them.

Added

How to use it

A tab set is a short list of pages — each with a title and optional notes — plus a group name, a colour and a message. The whole set travels inside the link, after the #, so it never reaches a server: opening the link shows the set here.

Getting your tabs in

Chrome doesn’t let any web page read your open tabs, so they are handed over with Chrome’s own features — no extension needed:

  • A window or a tab group: right-click the group → Move group to new window (if you want just that group), press ⌘⇧D (Ctrl+Shift+D) — Bookmark all tabs — and save the folder. Open the Bookmark manager (⌘⌥B / Ctrl+Shift+O), open the folder, select its bookmarks (⌘A), copy (⌘C), and paste on this page. Chrome copies bookmarks as bare addresses, so the titles are blank (edit them, or use the export below to keep them).

  • A few tabs: drag a tab from the tab strip onto the page; it arrives with its title.

  • Lots of folders: Bookmark manager → ⋮ → Export bookmarks, then Load bookmarks or JSON file… (or drop the file on the page). Every folder with links becomes a set; choose one, or combine them.

  • Chrome on Android: open the tab group, tap Share, copy the list and paste it here.

  • Any list of links works too: one address per line, numbered or bulleted lists, Markdown links, or links copied from a web page or document. Pasting anywhere on the page (outside a text box) adds them; repeated addresses and anything that isn’t a web page are skipped.

Using it

  • Open a link someone sent you (or paste one into Open a link). The set appears with its pages.

  • Edit the name, colour, message, titles, addresses and notes; reorder or remove pages, or add new ones. Addresses must be ordinary web pages (http or https) — anything else is left out.

  • Share: the link updates as you edit; Copy link and send it. Very long sets are better sent as the JSON file.

  • Download JSON saves the set in the Tab Studio file format; Download Markdown saves a list of links. Load file… (or drop a file on the page) opens a Chrome bookmarks export or a Tab Studio file — if it has several groups, you choose one, or combine them.

Opening the tabs

Browsers let one click open only one new tab, so without help use the Open button beside each page.

Optional: the Tab Studio Chrome extension, if you have it installed, opens the whole set at once as a named, coloured tab group (after asking), and adds a Get tabs with Tab Studio… button. Nothing on this page needs it.

Privacy

Everything happens in your browser. Your tabs reach this page only when you paste, drop or load them. The set lives in the link’s # part (never sent to the server) and in this browser’s storage as a draft. Nothing is uploaded.

Runs entirely in your browser; nothing you type leaves this page.