Session Tabs
Your tabs open themselves.
Your browser forgets the set your day is made of. Every morning you build it back by hand — one search, one bookmark, one half-remembered address at a time.
Session Tabs saves that set as a named session, then brings the whole thing back as a real Chrome tab group — at an hour you choose, when Chrome starts, or in one click whenever you want it. No account, and nothing ever leaves your computer.
Free. Two minutes to set up. Works in Chrome, and in Edge and Brave, which run Chrome extensions.
The part that is not like the others
You do not have to be there.
Every other tab tool is a filing cabinet. It only helps on the days you remember to open it, which is never the days you most needed it. A session with a time on it is not a filing cabinet.
A time, and the days it applies to.
Work at 8:00, Monday to Friday. Bills at 10:00 on Saturdays. Or no clock at all: whenever Chrome starts, for the set you want every single time.
You set it once, inside the session, and stop thinking about it. From then on that session’s row shows its time — so nothing the browser is going to do is hidden from you.
It arrives without interrupting.
A session that opens on its own never steals focus and never changes the tab you are on. The group appears in your tab strip, the toolbar icon shows a small number, and that is the entire announcement.
If the browser was closed when it was due, it opens when you start up — but only within two hours. A morning’s tabs erupting at six in the evening is not what anybody meant.
Still no account, still no server. A schedule is a line of text stored beside the session, on your own computer.
Three moments this is for
The same tabs, over and over, forever.
Not a one-off tidy-up. These are the sets you rebuild by hand every week without noticing how long it takes — and two of the three have an obvious hour attached to them.
The morning ritual
Email, calendar, the news you actually read. Give it 8:00 on weekdays and it stops being something you do at all — it is just what the browser looks like when you get there.
The mode switch
Client A’s tabs away and Client B’s tabs up, without losing either set in the shuffle. No clock fits this one — it happens when it happens, so it stays one click.
The chore session
Bank, utilities, bills — the tabs you need once a month and can never remember where you left. Saturday at 10:00, if that is when you actually sit down to it.
Organize each one once. After that it either arrives on its own, or it is one click away.
The other half
And it is still one click when you want it.
Automatic is the part nothing else does. It is not the part you use most, and the rest of the extension is built for hands.
Saving is one button that tells you what it will do.
Group some tabs in Chrome, open Session Tabs, and press Save. The button reads Save group “Morning”, or Save 3 selected tabs, or Save all 12 tabs — whichever is actually about to happen, so nothing is a surprise after the click.
Tab groups you have open but never saved sit at the top under Not saved yet, waiting to be turned into sessions.
Editing is not a ceremony.
Open a session to drop a tab, rename it, or change its colour. Drag a stray tab straight onto a session to file it. When a session is already on screen its button reads Update, which rewrites it to match what is actually there now.
And Export backup writes every session to a plain JSON file you keep — the only copy that survives removing the extension.
The obvious question
Chrome can save a tab group. So why this?
Because a saved group in Chrome is a live thing that keeps moving, it never arrives on its own, and a session here is a list you wrote down.
Chrome’s groups never come to you.
A saved group in Chrome is somewhere you go. Nothing in the browser opens one for you at eight in the morning, or when you start it up, and nothing in the category does either.
That is the whole difference. Every tool here, Chrome’s own feature included, waits to be remembered. This one does not need to be.
Your sessions never drift.
Chrome’s saved groups sync themselves and change underneath you: an edit made somewhere else rewrites them, tabs go missing without a word, and a group left untouched for six months gets closed for you.
A Session Tabs session changes when you press Update, and at no other time. What you saved on Monday is what opens on Friday.
They survive updates, crashes, and sign-outs.
Your sessions sit in this browser’s local storage on this computer, not in a synced account. Sign out of Chrome, restart after an update, or lose a window to a crash — the list is still exactly where it was.
And when you want a copy of your own, Export backup writes every session to a plain JSON file you keep.
Before you install
Chrome will show you two warnings.
Both are real, both sound worse than they are, and both deserve a straight answer rather than a shrug.
“Read your browsing history.”
This is Chrome’s wording for the tabs permission. Session Tabs reads the address and title of a tab so it can write them into a session you asked it to save. It does not read the contents of any page, it does not keep a record of where you go, and it is not watching you browse.
“View and manage your tab groups.”
This is the tabGroups permission. It is how the extension builds the named, coloured tab group your session opens into — and how it can tell that a session is already on screen and offer to update it instead.
There is a third permission Chrome does not warn about, because it grants access to nothing: alarms, which is what lets a session open at the time you set. It holds one alarm at a time, for the next session that is due. It does no polling and watches nothing.
Nothing leaves this computer, because there is nowhere for it to go: the extension requests access to no website at all and makes no network requests. No account, no cloud, no analytics, no tracking, no advertising.
It is also barred from private browsing — it declares "incognito": "not_allowed", so Chrome never shows it an incognito window. Read the full privacy policy for exactly what is stored and how to delete it.
Free, and staying free
Stop rebuilding your morning.
Save the set once, and give it an hour. After that it is either already open, or one click away.
No account, no sign-up, no paid tier. Works in Chrome; Edge and Brave run Chrome extensions, so it works there too.