Tab Session Snapshots: Save and Restore Your Tabs

## Why it matters

You open tabs for a project, close the window, and later realise you need them back. A snapshot saves that exact moment: all the tabs, their URLs, titles, which ones were pinned, which groups they belonged to. Restore the snapshot weeks later and you get the whole setup back without rummaging through history.

Unlike a cloud tab manager, a snapshot stays on your machine. Your tab list never leaves your device, so there's nothing to hack, no privacy trail, and nothing that reads what you're browsing.

## How it works

A snapshot is a record written to chrome.storage.local, which is your browser's local storage. The data stays on your own computer. When you save a snapshot, Scalpel writes the following for each window:

• every tab's URL and title
• whether each tab is pinned
• the name and colour of the group each tab belongs to

To restore a snapshot, Scalpel opens each saved window and tab, then rebuilds every group by matching its title and colour. The tabs load in the order they were saved. Your pinned tabs land at the left of the new window's tab strip, pinned.

The extension stores snapshots until you delete them. You can have many snapshots at once, each labelled so you can tell them apart.

## What does not matter

A snapshot is not a browser backup. It does not save your browser history, bookmarks, cookies, or login state. If you restore a snapshot of a site you were logged into, you land on the page, but you'll need to log in again if your session expired.

A snapshot does not watch your browsing. The extension only captures what you ask it to capture, when you ask. It does not run in the background taking periodic snapshots.

## Code example

Here's what a snapshot looks like inside chrome.storage.local. The structure is private (Scalpel writes and reads it, you don't need to touch it), but it shows what's stored:

{
  "snapshots": [
    {
      "id": "snap_1721234567",
      "label": "Work project",
      "timestamp": 1721234567890,
      "windows": [
        {
          "windowId": 1,
          "tabs": [
            {
              "url": "https://example.com/docs",
              "title": "Project Docs",
              "pinned": false,
              "groupId": null
            },
            {
              "url": "https://github.com/org/repo",
              "title": "GitHub Repo",
              "pinned": false,
              "groupId": 42
            }
          ],
          "groups": [
            {
              "groupId": 42,
              "title": "Code Review",
              "colour": "blue"
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}
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When you restore, Scalpel reads this structure, opens the windows and tabs, and uses chrome.tabs.group() to rebuild each group by matching title and colour.

## How Scalpel Manage Tabs shows it

In the toolbar popup, the snapshots panel holds a list of every snapshot you've saved. Each shows its label and when it was taken. Click "Restore" next to a snapshot and it opens all those windows and tabs back. The popup shows how much of your local storage quota the snapshots use, so you know when you're running low on space.

From the right-click menu, you can snapshot the current window in one click, which opens the save dialog and names the snapshot with today's date.