Add to Chrome — free

Chrome tab manager for researchers

You have five studies open at once: a coloured Chrome tab group for the lit review, another for the survey instrument, a third holding twelve PDFs from a systematic search, plus the datasets and the IRB protocol, each in its own colour so you can find them at a glance. A Chrome tab manager for researchers has to treat that arrangement as the working set it is, because the morning Chrome crashes mid-session — or an update relaunches and dissolves every group into a flat strip — is the morning you lose the exact set of papers you had narrowed down to. Chrome's own restore reopens recent tabs but forgets which group each belonged to, so you are left re-sorting forty tabs by hand instead of writing. Tabwell snapshots the whole window with each tab's group assignment — group name, colour, and collapsed state read through the chrome.tabGroups API — and writes them all back on restore, and it takes an auto-snapshot when Chrome exits so the next launch offers to bring the entire literature set back, groups and all. The record lives in local IndexedDB on your device, so it survives the update that would otherwise have scattered the session.

The researcher's working set is the tab groups, not the tabs

When you run several studies in parallel, the unit of work is the coloured group, not the individual tab. The red group is study one's papers, the blue group is the survey build, the green group is the dataset and analysis tabs. Lose the grouping and you have not lost twenty tabs — you have lost the map that told you which paper belonged to which question. That is why research tab organization in Chrome has to preserve group structure to be worth anything, and why Chrome's flat reopen leaves you re-building the arrangement from memory.

How Tabwell maps onto a multi-study workflow

Tabwell fits the way researchers already work rather than asking you to adopt a new system:

  • Snapshot the whole window with every coloured group intact. A snapshot is a JSON record of each window, each tab's title and URL, and each tab's group assignment with the group name, colour, and collapsed flag. Restore rebuilds those groups through chrome.tabGroups, so the lit-review group comes back red and collapsed exactly as you left it.
  • Crash and auto-snapshot recovery for the open literature. Tabwell writes an auto-snapshot when Chrome exits, so a crash, a forced update, or an accidental window close is covered. The next launch offers to restore the whole set. The Free tier runs this every 60 minutes; Pro tightens it to every 5 minutes for a session that changes fast during active coding or screening.
  • One study per group, archived and restored on demand. When a study wraps, keep its snapshot; months later, at write-up, restore that one snapshot to bring back the precise set of sources you cited — windows, tab order, and coloured groups rebuilt — instead of reconstructing the search from scratch.

Recover after a crash without having pressed save

The failure mode researchers fear is the unsaved one: Chrome dies with the working set open and nothing was manually saved. Because the auto-snapshot fires on exit, that case is the one Tabwell is built for — the companion guides on restoring Chrome tabs after a crash and recovering closed tabs in Chrome walk through the restore flow and where Chrome's native paths fall short, and the guide on saving tab groups in Chrome covers capturing a group's colour and collapsed state on demand. This page does not re-teach those steps; it shows why the workflow matters for concurrent studies.

Free vs Pro for a research workload

Every install from the Chrome Web Store starts with a 14-day Pro trial, no credit card. After it, the Free tier keeps your latest 5 snapshots with manual save and restore, JSON export for backup, and a 60-minute auto-snapshot — enough to roll one crash back to the last hour. A researcher juggling several long-running studies usually wants more history than five snapshots: Pro lifts the cap to unlimited, indexes every saved tab's title and URL for full-text search so you can find a paper across months of archived studies, and auto-snapshots every 5 minutes. Pricing is $3.99/month, $29/year, $59 one-time, or $19 one-time for the first 1,000 Founders buyers, with a 30-day refund.

FAQ

Can I recover all my open papers after Chrome crashes mid-study?

Yes. Tabwell writes an auto-snapshot when Chrome exits, so when you relaunch it offers to restore whatever was open, including every coloured study group. If you skipped the prompt, open the Tabwell side panel and restore the most recent snapshot from the timestamped list. The Free tier auto-snapshots every 60 minutes and Pro every 5 minutes.

Do my coloured tab groups survive a restore?

Yes. A snapshot stores each tab's group assignment with the group name, colour, and collapsed state, read through the chrome.tabGroups API. On restore Tabwell rebuilds those groups rather than dropping every tab into a flat list, so the red lit-review group comes back red and collapsed. This is the difference from Chrome's native reopen, which forgets group membership.

Can I keep one study per group and reopen it months later for write-up?

Yes. Keep a study's snapshot when the study wraps, then restore that single snapshot later to bring back the exact set of sources, windows, and coloured groups. Pro keeps unlimited snapshots, so archived studies do not push out recent work. On the Free tier only the latest 5 snapshots are kept.

How does Tabwell handle five or more studies open at the same time?

Each study lives in its own coloured Chrome tab group, and a single snapshot captures the whole window with all of those groups at once. You can restore the entire working set together, or archive one study's snapshot and restore it on its own later. Pro full-text search across saved snapshots lets you find a specific paper by title or URL across every study.

Where is my research data stored, and does it leave my device?

Snapshots are stored locally in IndexedDB on your device via dexie. Tab URLs and titles never leave the device; the only network call is to Polar for license verification, which carries no tab data. There is no account or email required to use the extension.

Is the full-text search across saved studies free, and what does Pro cost?

Full-text search and unlimited snapshots are Pro features, available during the 14-day trial every install starts with. After the trial the Free tier keeps the latest 5 snapshots with manual save, restore, and JSON export. Pro is $3.99/month, $29/year, $59 one-time, or $19 one-time for the first 1,000 Founders buyers, with a 30-day refund.

Does Tabwell require Chrome 114 or later?

Yes. Chrome 114 is the minimum supported version because Tabwell uses the chrome.sidePanel API introduced there, alongside chrome.tabs and chrome.tabGroups. Edge and other Chromium browsers may work but are not officially supported. Firefox and Safari are not supported.