The Chrome web browser has a great deal going for it: fast page rendering, a clean interface, powerful extensions, and the marketing of Google behind it. If there are any complaints to be made about it, though, I’ve found that it can be slow to launch when when you’re reopening it with a large number of tabs.
You may well have tried out Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and any of countless other lesser known web browser, but you’ll likely find that Chrome’s not the only one with this problem. Chrome does, however, have a solution: Session Buddy. Session Buddy is an extension that could make your tabs easier to manage and help to dramatically improve Chrome’s performance. Let’s take a look.
Install the Extension
Session Buddy is currently only available for Chrome, so fire up your copy of Chrome and pay a visit to the extension’s download page in the Chrome Web Store.
Click the blue Add To Chome button and then click the Add button in the popup that appears. There will be a slight pause while the installation takes place and then a new toolbar button will be added.
Session Buddy is only available for Chrome, so you’re in luck if this your browser of choice.
Configuring Settings
Before you start using Session Buddy and relying on its tab session saving, it’s advisable to spend a moment or two checking through the settings to ensure that everything is configured in a way that makes sense for the way you work in Chrome.
Click the menu button to the far right of the Chrome toolbar, select Settings and then click the Extensions link to the left. Locate the entry for Session Buddy to the right and click the Options link beneath it.
Make sure Session Buddy is configured to your liking before using it.
On the General tab, you can use the first drop down menu to choose what happens when you have tabs open in multiple windows. You can use Session Buddy to restore them to their original windows when you need to recall them, or you can opt to have them all combined into a single window if you prefer.
The descriptions for all of the available options make it clear what they all do, so you can just enable the ones you think you will find useful. You can always return and change things later if necessary. One setting that is worth enabling is the one labelled ‘Show tab count of current session on extension icon’ which will let you know how many tabs you have open at any given time through the toolbar button.
You can adjust setting to choose how Session Buddy should handle tabs in multiple windows.
Moving to the Filter tab, you can use the first checkbox to indicate whether or not any Session Buddy tabs you have open should be considered part of a session, while the second one gives you the same option for Chrome settings tabs (such as chrome://about/).
While you’re here, head over to the Keyboard tab where you can learn a series of keyboard shortcuts that will help you to access common features more easily.
You can speed up lots of common tasks with keyboard shortcuts.
Using Session Buddy
If you have a tendency to have a huge number of tabs open in Chrome at any one time, you’ll be only too aware that it does not take the browser long to slow down to a crawl. But perhaps the biggest annoyance comes at startup when Chrome loads each and every tab you had open in your last session.
As the name would suggest, Session Buddy enables you to save your open tabs into sessions and you can then choose which ones should be opened. This is something that can be used in a number of ways.
First, you can use the feature to limit the number of tabs that you have to open at startup, but you can also save a great deal of time by saving sessions that provide you with access to all of the sites you need to use for different tasks. Click the Session Buddy toolbar button and you’ll see a list of all of the tabs you currently have open.
Session Buddy constantly monitors all of the tabs you have open and saves them as sessions.
As you open tabs and windows, Session Buddy will automatically save everything so you can recall them at any time. If you close down a window which contained a series of tabs, all you need to do is call up the extension and hit the ‘Restore set of windows’ button and you session will be reloaded.
Closed tabs by accident? Session Buddy can get them back.
There may well be a number of web sites you use on a regular basis. You might check a series of news sites first thing in the morning, and when you are working on a particular project you might have another set of tabs open.
To make it easier to switch between these tabs without having to manually load bookmarks individually, you can save sessions. Setup a browser window with a set of tabs you want to use together, click the Session Buddy toolbar button, and then click the Save button before entering a suitable name. That’s it.
With this done, you can safely close down Chrome without worrying about which tabs will be saved automatically by the browser as you can easily call up saved sessions whenever you need then. All you need to do is click Session Buddy and then make a selection from the Saved Session section to the right of the screen.
Use Saved Sessions to quickly load a group of related tabs.
In this way you can keep tabs grouped together, saving them in such a way that they can be quickly recalled whenever they are needed without the need to have Chrome load every single tab at startup.
Conclusion
So there you have it: a way to get Chrome to startup with exactly the tabs you need open, right when you need them open. It’s the perfect solution for keeping you productive in Chrome without waiting forever for everything to load.
If you have any other Chrome extensions that keep you productive and you couldn’t live without, we’d love to hear about them in the comments below.