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How I'm combining extensions to replace Tabs Outliner

4 years ago • updated by 3 years ago • 20

Let me start this by praising how TO is wonderful. I purchased its licence almost 2 years ago and it has been my main productivity and organization tool for sites and tabs. It escalates wonderfully for many hundreds of tabs and its tree structure with node element makes it very easy to organize them all.

It's rly sad that it's abandoned and issues ppl faced almost a decade ago are still around.

I started looking for alternatives, and indeed there's no Chromium or FireFox extension that steps anywhere close to have TO features.

I'm listing here the tools I've been using to get the features I have with TO.

1) Brave browser: it rly annoys me to use Chrome. I hate how Mozilla had crippled FireFox with its Quantum remake. Many awesome addons were killed and its new API is too limited to allow any serious customization of the browser. That made me move to Chromium years ago, but I never wanted to use Chrome. TO forced me to, and now I'll be free from it.

2) TabFern: it's very very limited, but it's the best available. It doesn't support organizing tabs on tree structure, it doesn't have note nodes. But it supports multiple windows and manages all of them from its own window, as TO does. To organize tabs on groups, each group must be in its own window. It supports backup to a normal file saved anywhere on HD, its data uses json. That's great, as we can save backups anywhere we want and edit them manually. Restoring is trouble, as we can't backup-restore single windows and are forced to place all windows on the file. When restoring, all windows on the file are duplicated. But it's open source, it's being slowly developed, and there are a few ppl working on its development.

3) OneTab: its Usability is very very bad, it simply copies all opened tabs to a internal list of links placed on a internal HTML page and then closes them all. This list is stored internally on the browser and there are reports of it corrupting. But it supports exporting and importing them, using plain text for that. By doing so I'm able to keep my tabs organized on an external tool (4). I export each group of tabs to there and delete it from OneTab, and when I wanna open a tab from it I either copy its URL or import the whole group back to OneTab.

4) TheBrain: it's a great mind mapping tool, it's been some years I bought a license for it and now created a new brain for managing tabs. It's a really very powerful tool for organizing complex data, much more powerful them a "simple" tree structure, which most tabs managers don't even have. Each node has 1 or more tabs groups, composed of OneTab list of tabs. I either browse its structure or search for anything I want, then either take a URL or copy a full list and import to OneTab.

Yeah, it requires combining 2 extensions and 1 external tool, and requires a very lot of clicks to move tabs around. TO is much more comfortable to use, but it also has its lots of issues and lack of support.

Organizing tabs on a Brain structure is much more powerful than a tree structure, and I believe I won't wanna turn back once I have all my tabs moved to it!!

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