I recently stumbled across the extension Toby (Chrome, Firefox), and I’m surprised at how much I love it. So much so that it has replaced the pretty Chrome Delight and Earth View from Google Earth extensions I’ve been using whenever I open a new tab. I’m one-hundred per cent Toby now, because it’s one of the best ways I’ve seen to get a little more control over all those open tabs in my browser.
I commend those of you who can go “browser zero” — only opening and closing tabs when you need them, rather than using open tabs (and your browser’s “pick up where I left off” feature) to just store a never-ending stream of sites that you should check out, but are too lazy to bookmark for whatever reason.
Though extensions like OneTab are also great for helping you keep your browser’s open tabs from getting too chaotic, I really like Toby for a few reasons. First, it’s a lot more graphical: You create different categories for tabs to live in, like “sites I should really check out,” “gaming sites,” or “work stuff,” and you drop in your open tabs as clickable cards. You can drag these cards around in any order or move them to a different category whenever you want, which is a great way to build a priority list of tabs that, ultimately, can help you reduce the amount of stuff on your “to be visited” list.
Make a Toby account; get advanced features
If you make an account with Toby, not only do you get to unlock the extension’s dark mode – my fave – but your tab configuration will also synchronise to the company’s servers, ensuring a browser crash won’t affect your pretty, organised setup. Toby launches in every new browser tab you open, ensuring that all the sites you’ve been meaning to visit can keep reminding you that they exist.
You can also add new “note” cards if you need to keep track of some important piece of data or just want to add a little discussion about a particular site or category. Sharing a full category’s worth of tabs with others is easy, too, if you want to give your friends a list of all the awesome gaming sites you’ve been collecting.
Comments
2 responses to “Organise Your Excessive Browser Tabs With ‘Toby’”
I used to use Toby on Chrome, didn’t realize they’d made a Firefox version (last I checked they hadn’t).
Damnit. It’s so close. Drag-and-drop doesn’t work in Firefox, which is a real bummer. Still, I’ve got all my old collections back, and I can still add tabs manually, so it’s still somewhat useful
Sounded very interesting but then when I went to install it I was asked to give permission for:
– Access your data for all web sites [Why does it need this? Thumbnails? I haven’t used it]
– Access browser tabs [get that as it’s organising tabs, so makes sense]
– Store unlimited amount of client-side data [But then this! What exactly does this mean???]
In theory all of this is fine but there isn’t enough information. If the data is required for the extension all good but it’s unclear if the data is sent externally after giving permission.
Anyone have insights in what the above permissions truly mean?
Rob