Tabalanche

Q: How is Tabalanche different from other extensions that save tabs, like OneTab?

I wrote Tabalanche to address some of my frustrations with OneTab:

Tabalanche doesn't slow down the more you use it

The technical design of OneTab means that, every time you use it to stash tabs, it takes every tab you've ever saved out of storage, adds your new tabs to those tabs, and sends every single tab back out, every single time. This isn't too slow when you're first using OneTab, and you only have a few hundred tabs - but, once you've been using it for a few months, saving fifty tabs a week or so, the slowness adds up. When you have several thousand tabs saved up, OneTab can freeze your entire browser, for minutes at a time, every time you try to save even a single tab (or even just open the browser, as OneTab loads all of your saved tabs at once for its start page).

Tabalanche, in contrast, is written using a proper database that allows for each group of tabs to be saved or loaded individually, which means that, even after saving tens of thousands of tabs, Tabalanche responds within seconds, whether stashing a group or reading the list.

Tabalanche makes it easier to keep some tabs open

OneTab has two ways of interacting with it: the browser action button, which closes every tab in the window, and the right-click context menu, which exposes every action OneTab can take in a long, segmented list. This makes it so that, when looking to send only certain pages to OneTab, you have to either move a certain set of tabs to a new window - only so it can be closed by clicking the OneTab button - or opening a new tab and thinking through which sequence of items you need to click in the page to make what you want happen (and hope that you don't accidentally click the menu item above it and close all the other tabs by mistake).

In Tabalanche, clicking the button opens a popup with four large, illustrated buttons for picking which tabs to stash, as well as a button to open the list of tabs that have previously been stashed. This way, you don't need to mess around with new windows or complex menus just to keep the tabs you need open.

Tabalanche doesn't make it easy to accidentally close everything

Having Tabalanche's stash options under a popup means that, if you accidentally click the button, you can easily back out before anything closes. In OneTab, if you accidentally click the OneTab button, every tab in the entire window will immediately be closed, without asking.

Tabalanche is open source

Having all these problems with OneTab, I knew I could have fixed it to work better - but, not only does OneTab not have any way for its users to contribute improvements, its source code uses obfuscatory techniques to make it harder for outsiders to work with it.

Tabalanche is fully open source on GitHub, so any user wanting to contribute improvements can suggest them via issue or pull request.