Export Your Innumerable Open Browser Tabs With ‘TabTopus’

macOS: If you have a habit of leaving ton of tabs open across a variety of browsers, well, here’s the good news: You’re not alone. Try as we might to stay organized, tab sprawl just… happens. And sometimes, it doesn’t stay confined to just one of the browsers you have installed on your system—if, say, you use Safari for work and Chrome (or others) in your personal time.

Whether you use one browser or four, the simplest way to get control of your tab addiction is to quit cold turkey. And by that, I don’t mean “stop using tabs.” Rather, take all of the tabs you have open, dump them into a file, and store them on your desktop somewhere. Each and every time I’ve done this, I’ve found myself never going back to that file to find something I’d left crowding my browser. I still keep the file just in case, because you never know. And maybe you’ll actually go back to it! Perhaps I’m the outlier who takes “cold turkey” a bit too seriously.

To create this file, you could go through the arduous process of copying and pasting the URLs of all of your open tabs into a document. That’s not very fun. You could also install extensions in all of your browsers and use them to manually export your open tabs. That’s better, but still a process. The best solution, which I just recently discovered, is a fun little app called TabTopus. (Think “tabs” = “octopus.”)

The full version of TabTopus will set you back $2 on the Mac App Store—and it doesn’t work with Firefox as of this writing. Those two drawbacks aside, it works really well with Safari, Edge/Edge Chromium, and Chrome. All you have to do is pick your browser and click on whether you’d like a plain text or HTML-based list of your bookmarks.

TabTopus then launches your browser, captures all of your tabs, and lets you pick a location to export the resulting file. That’s it. When you load said file, it looks a little something like this—boring, but efficient:

Is that worth $2? If you only ever have a few tabs open in a single browser, no. If you’re like me, with 60+ tabs open in Chrome, another 10 in Safari and a growing handful in Edge Chromium—and you know this is a pattern of behavior you’re doomed to repeat—then, sure, the convenience is absolutely worth it. And if, or when, TabTopus begins to support Firefox, your $2 purchase will go that much further.

On the other hand, if you are browser-monogamous, an extension like OneTab should be all you need to export your tabs in the single browser you use. Whatever your preference, I couldn’t recommend the general approach more. Not only will you free up some processing resources and eliminate a huge eyesore above your address bar, you’ll save yourself the time of trying to dump all your tabs into bookmarks, sorting them and then forgetting about them for the next three years anyway.