Advanced and automated tab management

Question

I am looking for a tool which will help with tab and task management. I am a tab hoarder and often end up with 100-200 tabs before giving up and starting over. My request is for a tool which will do the following:

1. Present certain webpages/tabs on a schedule (for instance, lets say I want to, daily, check the sysadmin subreddit page, the schneier.com blog, and a few news sites). Right now, I typically try to put all those tabs in a window and check them each day but this is obviously really inefficient and causes clutter. I also don't want them to be my 'startup' pages because there are typically things I am actually using more than once or so per day to help with my job/other tasks.

2. A way to group collections of tabs and manage them. For instance I may have my set of random 'read this when you get a moment' tabs, 'things i'm researching to figure out this coding issue', 'email, social apps, etc.', 'funny stuff, shopping, finance, misc other stuff'. Right now I try to put them in different windows but, again, this isn't particularly effective. If I could hide the 'read later' things and then view them when I have time, that would be great. The social ones would be nice if I could open/close all of them at once (gmail, twitter, fb, owa, etc)

So yeah, Ideally I'm looking for a sweet way to automate my web experience so that I can open up my browser in the morning, see my 'daily' sites, close those, open where i left off on my coding research or whatever, toggle in and out of my social apps window, track things I want to watch/read, and so forth.

Any idea if anything like this exists?

Answer 1

You didn't mention what browser you are using. If you are using Chrome, then I have found a couple of things that might be of use to you. I haven't found 1 chrome extension that would do everything you want it to, so it will have to be a combination of 2 things: the scheduling and the organization.

1. Let's start with organization first.

Toby (works quite well for me):

• comes as a full blown and a mini version (both have the same functionalities, it is just that the mini version does not work as the new tab replacement),
• allows you to organize your tabs as you want, giving your tab collections a name, tags, adding notes, changing colors, etc.
• you can have multiple collections opened,
• you can open one collection and close all the others with one click,
• you can import your collections,
• you can search your collections,
• all in all, it is quite neat.

Then, there is Tabs Outlier:

• shows all your open tabs in a tree structure,

• it has the unique ability to close and preserve “in place” any tab or window, without removing them from the original context in the tree

• you will be able to annotate windows and tabs, add comments to them, notes, a summary of main ideas, to-do items,

• organize all of this in logical hierarchies and delimited groups; freely reorder to specify priority or importance,

• you can export your tabs.

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2. Now, the scheduling.

Tab Schedule

• very simple and very easy, just add the URL of the website and the time when you want it open,
• however, there it does not support recurrent opening, so you will have to schedule it separately for every day,
• the time interval is 15 min, so you can schedule the page to be open either at 12:00 pm or 12:15 pm or 12:30 pm, etc.

Crontabs

• a bit more sophisticated than Tab Schedule and is more functional,
• same as the extension above, it enables you to type in the URL of the website you want to open on schedule (no set intervals, so you can set any time) input the time and select multiple days of the week at once,
• you can also set the time to close the tab,
• you get an advanced functionality where you can

  Create and edit cron- or text expression-based tab schedules at the lowest possible level to satisfy your inner geek.

Sadly, none of the extensions work together, so you will have to schedule your tabs manually and not as a collection that you have made in another extension. But it is something to start with :)