Disruptive Conversations

1. Bookmark all my tabs across all my windows into a bookmark folder that I can name.
2. Let me go back through those bookmarked tabs to find individual ones I want.

That's all I want... take a snapshot of all the tabs in the all the windows... and then let me get back to that data easily.

The add-on Tab Mix Plus almost gets me there. It does my #1 above in that it will capture all my tabs across all my windows. But unless I'm missing something it doesn't let me do my #2... it treats the capture of all my windows and tabs as a "session" and lets me save "sessions". But I can't (that I can see) easily access individual pages that I had opened. I can reload the session... but that's it. All or nothing. If I want to just get to one page that I had open, I'm out of luck.

There is, of course, the built-in "Bookmark All Tabs..." option in Firefox's Bookmarks menu, but this only works for a single window. I have to do it for each of my various windows... which can take a while.

Now why do I want this? Largely it's the way I work... a large part of my work involves researching various emerging new technologies. When I'm in a deep dive, I may open up several windows each with a whole bunch of tabs. Sometimes explorations lead on to other explorations.... sometimes my current thread of research is interrupted by some other thread, which spawns its own windows.... and then there may be yet another thread of research I'm interested in based on something I saw in my Twitter or RSS feed.

It's fairly routine for me to have 8, 9 or 10 Firefox windows open, each with some number of tabs. A recent save with Tab Mix Plus was of 9 windows and 53 tabs.

Now it's unfortunately also fairly routine that some tab somewhere will have some bad code in the page that will cause Firefox to start eating up my CPU. At which point I have to try to figure out which tab it is - or living with a slower (and HOT) MacBook Pro. And at some point I'll want to restart Firefox so that I can have my computer back.

Ergo... my interest in this Add-on/Extension. I'd like to just take a snapshot of where all my research is, restart Firefox, and then be able to go back to parts of the windows that I had open before.

Seen anything like this?

P.S. And yes, this is one reason I'm looking forward to Google Chrome coming out on Mac OS X... it has that "Task Manager"-like view that lets you identify (and kill) whichever tab it is that is going rogue. (And yes, I know there's a proof-of-concept browser on the Mac that is similar, but given some feedback I've heard I've been wary of trying it out.)

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