You are installed. Here is the whole thing in three moves.
Session Tabs saves the tabs your day is made of, and puts them back as a real Chrome tab group whenever you want them. This page takes about a minute to read, and you will not need it again.
The loop
Group, save, reopen
Session Tabs works with Chrome’s own tab groups rather than replacing them. So the first move happens in Chrome, not in the extension.
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Put some tabs in a group
Right-click any tab and choose Add tab to new group. Give it a name — Morning, Client work, whatever the set is.
To put more tabs in it, right-click each one and choose Add tab to group, then pick your group by name. (You can drag tabs in instead, but you have to drop them right on top of the group’s existing tabs until the coloured underline stretches over them — the right-click menu is easier.)
Chrome’s own tab groups — no extension needed for this part -
Click the icon, then Save
Open Session Tabs from your toolbar. Your live group shows up at the top under Not saved yet. Hit Save and it drops into Your sessions below, kept for good.
Saving moves it down into your list -
Tomorrow, click Open
Closed the group? Restarted the computer? Open Session Tabs and press Open. Every tab comes back, in a group with the same name and colour. That is the whole point of it.
The part that works while you are not looking
Or have it open itself
Every other tab tool is a filing cabinet: it only helps on the days you remember to open it. A session here can arrive on its own instead. Click a session’s name to open it up, and set Opens by itself.
At a time
Pick an hour and the days it applies to. Work at 8:00, Monday to Friday. Bills at 10:00 on Saturdays. The tabs are simply there when you get to them.
When Chrome starts
For the set you want every single time you open the browser. No clock involved — it happens as Chrome comes up.
It will not interrupt you. A session that opens on its own does not steal focus and does not switch your tab. The group appears in your tab strip, the toolbar icon gets a small number, and that is the entire announcement. Open the popup and the number clears.
It will not ambush you either. If Chrome was closed at 8:00 and you start it at 8:40, your morning session still opens. If you start it at six in the evening, it does not — a set of tabs erupting ten hours late is not what anybody meant. Two hours is the cut-off.
Still nothing leaves your computer. The schedule is stored beside the session, on this machine. There is no server involved in any of this, and the extension has no permission to reach one.
Worth knowing
Four small things
Update, not re-save
When a saved session is open, its button reads Update — that refreshes it to match whatever is on screen now.
Quicker way to add something: drag a row from the top of the list straight onto a session — or press its Add to… button and pick one.
Edit any session
Click a session’s name to open it up. Drop a tab you no longer want, rename it, or change its colour. + Add this tab adds whatever page you are looking at — handy when the session is not currently open.
Export backup
The button at the bottom saves everything to a file. Worth doing once now: it is the only copy that survives removing the extension.
Nothing leaves your computer
No account, no cloud, no tracking. Your sessions sit in Chrome’s own storage on this machine, and go nowhere unless you export them yourself.
Why it asked to “read your browsing history”. That is Chrome’s wording for reading the addresses and titles of your open tabs — which is the entire job. It reads them when you press Save, writes them locally, and does nothing else with them. The extension has no permission to reach any website, so it could not send them anywhere even if it tried.
Updating and housekeeping
Two buttons that save you typing
Chrome will not let a web page link to its own settings pages, so these live in here instead.
That is everything.
Go make a tab group and save it. If you ever want this page again, there is a How it works link at the bottom of the extension.