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Chrome tab manager for students

It is week ten and you have five courses open at once: a blue Chrome tab group for the stats lectures and problem sets, a green one for the history readings and the essay brief, an orange group of biology slides and lab notes, plus the assignment portal and two library databases, each in its own colour so you can jump between them between classes. A Chrome tab manager for students has to treat that arrangement as the working set it is, because the night before an exam — when you have finally pulled the right readings, past papers, and lecture notes into one window — is the night Chrome crashes, or an update relaunches and dissolves every group into a flat strip. Chrome's own restore reopens recent tabs but forgets which group each belonged to, so instead of revising you spend twenty minutes re-sorting tabs into courses by hand. 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 course 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.

A student's working set is the course groups, not the tabs

When you carry several courses in one window, the unit of work is the coloured group, not the individual tab. The blue group is stats, the green group is the history essay, the orange group is the biology lab. Lose the grouping and you have not lost thirty tabs — you have lost the map that told you which reading belonged to which course and which deadline. That is why study tab organization in Chrome has to preserve group structure to be worth anything, and why Chrome's flat reopen leaves you rebuilding your courses from memory the night before they are due.

How Tabwell maps onto a term's worth of courses

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

  • Snapshot the whole window with every coloured course 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 stats group comes back blue and collapsed exactly as you left it.
  • Exam-prep snapshots you can fall back on. When you have assembled the readings, past papers, and notes for a subject, save that set as a named snapshot. If Chrome crashes or you close the wrong window the night before the test, restore it and the full revision set is back in seconds. Tabwell also writes an auto-snapshot when Chrome exits, every 60 minutes on the Free tier and every 5 minutes on Pro, so even an unsaved session is covered.
  • Archive a finished course, restore it for the final. When a course wraps for the term, keep its snapshot; weeks later, when the cumulative exam comes around, restore that one snapshot to bring back the precise set of slides and readings — windows, tab order, and the coloured group rebuilt — instead of hunting the syllabus links again.

Recover your study tabs after a crash without having pressed save

The failure mode students fear is the unsaved one: Chrome dies with a full revision window 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 when several courses share one window.

Free vs Pro for a student 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 student running four or five courses across a term 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 reading across a whole term of archived courses, and auto-snapshots every 5 minutes during heavy revision. 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. There is no separate student discount; the Founders price is the cheapest lifetime option.

FAQ

Can I recover all my study tabs after Chrome crashes during exam prep?

Yes. Tabwell writes an auto-snapshot when Chrome exits, so when you relaunch it offers to restore whatever was open, including every coloured course 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 course 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 blue stats group comes back blue and collapsed. This is the difference from Chrome's native reopen, which forgets group membership.

Can I archive a finished course and reopen it later for a cumulative final?

Yes. Keep a course's snapshot when the term moves on, then restore that single snapshot later to bring back the exact set of slides, readings, and the assignment brief, with windows, tab order, and the coloured group rebuilt. Pro keeps unlimited snapshots, so archived courses do not push out recent work. On the Free tier only the latest 5 snapshots are kept.

How does Tabwell handle four or five courses open in the same window?

Each course 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 term's working set together, or archive one course's snapshot and restore it on its own later. Pro full-text search across saved snapshots lets you find a specific reading by title or URL across every course.

Where is my study 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 there a student discount, and what does Pro cost?

There is no separate student discount, but the Founders Lifetime price of $19 one-time is the cheapest option while the first 1,000 spots last. 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 also $3.99/month, $29/year, or $59 one-time, 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.