Easy-to-use extension lets you export entire sessions

Jun 25, 2019 12:03 GMT  ·  By

Tab support is one of the best things about modern browsers, and these days the typical Internet user keeps more than a handful of tabs running at the same time regardless of app, platform, and device.

But despite the fact that browsers themselves evolved substantially in the last few years, some features are still missing. And this is where third-party extensions come into play.

Having a large extension ecosystem is something that can help deal with the lack of certain capabilities, as third-party developers can create their own add-ons that others might find useful as well.

This is the case of a feature that we’re going to discuss about today. Exporting your active tabs to a TXT or HTML file is something that many people want to do, but which is impossible right now in Google Chrome without turning to an extension.

First of all, why and who needs such a thing?

Exporting the active tabs could help save a browsing session, but at the same time, it also lets users share more than just a link with someone else quite easily.

Also, by saving browsing sessions in a TXT or HTML file and not in a dedicated extension, users can increase productivity, especially in those cases when they’re working on a research paper from more than just one device and syncing isn’t available.

Exporting Google Chrome tabs to file

In most of the cases, a tab management or session manager extension should do the job, and this is the case with exporting tabs as well. The extension that can help you with this is called Session Buddy.

This add-on comes with all kinds of extra features, like organizing tabs by topic, searching the open and saved tabs, but the feature we’re interesting in concerns the support for exporting.

With support for Chromium, which means it can be installed on all browsers powered by this engine, including Google Chrome and the new Microsoft Edge, Session Buddy supports exporting to the following formats:  

Text
CSV
Markdown
HTML
JSON
The output can be further customized with several details, as it follows:  
Sessions
Windows
Titles
URLs
A preview of the exported content is also offered, so you can always see the output before saving to file.

Exporting Google Chrome tabs to file

After the extension is installed, you need to click its icon to access all options. You should now see more information on the current session, with a list of tabs that are going to be included in the list you plan to export.

As said, Session Buddy also lets you save multiple sessions and restore them from previous backups, but for exporting, you need to click the settings gear in the top right corner.

You are then prompted to configure all the above based on the active tabs that were listed in the main screen.

One feature that this extension is missing is support for custom output locations. All files are automatically saved in the downloads folder on Windows 10 devices, so you can’t define another location on the computer. However, a small notification is displayed in the export screen when the file is saved, so you can click the provided path to go directly to file.

It goes without saying that there are so many other extensions that could help you export the active tabs to a file, but I think Session Buddy is one of the easiest to use thanks to its clean UI and straightforward approach.

Let us know in the comment box after the jump if you prefer using a different extension for exporting your active tabs.

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Exporting Google Chrome tabs to file
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