The best productivity tool for your infinite opened browser tabs

Pavel Lupu
4 min readJul 15, 2020

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We've all been there.

Since the beginning of the internet the search for information became a normality. You need some info about the chicken flu? open a new tab (CTRL + T) type 'chicken flu' in the search bar press enter. A fraction of a second (0.76s to be exact) later you are bombarded with a search engine result (google in my case) telling you that the chicken flu is actually called avian influenza and you navigate to the wikipedia link to read a few seconds.

Search engine result

You have tens if not hundreds of open tabs in your browser, possibly a few youtube tabs, each with a different video, one with house music, one with Britain's Got Talent and a few from yesterday, I get it.

You also have a facebook messenger tab opened to talk with your mom, because you don't want to spend time on facebook, because it's "distracting" you from work. An WhatsApp tab to talk with your friends. A slack tab, gmail, and what not.

You also did a research the other day for your [insert-project-name] and you don't know how exactly you stumbled upon all this info because you were busy researching and not memorising your path. And of course you can't close them because who knows when or why would you need them again.

I GET IT — you need all of your tabs.

There is a name for you — Urban Dictionary is calling you the 'Tab Hoarder'

The Tab-Hoarder is one who is reluctant to close internet tabs, usually resulting in a buildup of chaotic tab clutter on the browser toolbar.

Sometimes results in “Browser — Paralysis”.

Usually consists of multiple YouTube windows, a few StumbleUpon tabs, Facebook, Break.com, I-players or random episodes of pirated TV shows etc…

The Tab-Hoarder will always choose to open (yet another) “new tab” instead of overwriting current browse window. It may come in use later.

- “No wait — don’t close that window — I might come back to it later.”

I recently wrote a medium article where I described a tab management solution called “OneTab” which basically “minimises” all of your tabs into a single tab, so you can have a birds-eye view over your tabs, and open only the ones that you need (or all of them you sick human). I have lost all of my hoarded tabs (about 700 of them) when I set up a new PC at home. So I started looking for a better solution, that's when I stumbled upon a solution I describe below.

The great news is that — It can finally come to a resolution

You can now release your tabs free. You no longer need to hoard them with the fear of losing them. You can actually do that now with …

I present to you….

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Drum

Roll

Please

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WORKONA

The world’s most powerful tab manager.

Workona logo

They describe themselves as "The world’s most powerful tab manager." and I agree with them.

It is basically a chrome extension. But boy can you do a lot with it. I was impressed so much I even wrote this article.

What can it do?

From now on you can save your oh-so-precious tabs into a workspace, create different workspaces for each project and have them there. Switch between your workspaces, close tabs from there.

Workona will keep your not-in-use tabs in the background and bring them forward when you need them (i.e. when switching between workspaces). This way keeping your RAM in the breathe-able area.

You obviously would need an account with them to be able to save your tabs.

This brings so much power to your browser ninja skills. You can now have all your workplaces wherever you install this extension, say you have a PC at work and a macbook at home. You can start your research at work and finish at home. I know this is something google chrome already has built-in with the google account sync. Believe me it is a huge improvement upon that. Seriously give it a try. It blew my mind.

It is like a dropbox for your tabs.

You can organise your tabs and also create "resources" from your tabs, this way you can share for example all the (links in your) tabs for the resources needed to write a blog post about unicorns. Talk about teamwork.

It also has a ton of apps you can integrate it with. Gmail, Drive, Trello, GitHub, Slack, inVision, Google Meet, you name it, they have it. What a great time to live in.

The pricing for the PRO version of this piece of magic is $6 and it's not yet available, but I already see value in it, and can only imagine myself using it for the foreseeable future. I also believe that they will be so big, google will offer to buy them at some point.

WOW.

Sign up for workona

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Pavel Lupu

Entrepreneur. UX designer. Front-end Dev. Humanbeliever.