How do I...

Note that:

• Pinned tabs never get auto-archived.
• The selected tab of an inactive window is still considered inactive.

To archive the current tab manually:

• Click the “Tab” button in the extension popup
  
• Control-WAlt-Shift-W keyboard shortcut. You can change it in chrome://extensions/shortcuts

You can also archive any open tab by clicking icon next to an open tab.

There are several ways of doing this:

• Click the “Window” button in the extension popup
  
• On the Tab Cellar page, click on the vertical bar
  
• Configure a keyboard shortcut in chrome://extensions/shortcuts

In the Archived section, simply click on an item.

Can I choose where to restore it?

Right-click to show more options:

“In Original Tab” deserves an explanation. Say, the archived tab was 3rd in a particular window. When restoring, it will try to find that window and place the tab 3rd.

Right-click a tab and select “Unload” context menu item:

To unload all tabs in a window, right-click the vertical window bar:

Tab group’s context menu has the same “Unload All” item.

Archive several selected tabs

1. CtrlCommand-click them on the Chrome tab bar (or Shift-click to select a range)
2. Click on “3 tabs” button
   (3 is the number of selected tabs in this example)
   

Archive everything but selected

Hold AltOption

Right-click while holding Alt⌥ to archive all tabs above in the selected.

Alt-Shift-Backspace⌥⇧Delete keyboard shortcut also archives tabs above the selected one.

Archived tabs are synced between Chrome browsers as long as “Sync is on”.

Where do you save my data?

Chrome stored this data on Google servers, Edge on Microsoft’s. The data is securely sent over HTTPS.

Can you read my data?

Absolutely not! Tab Cellar uses storage.sync API; extensions developers have no access to this data whatsoever.

How many tabs can I sync?

There’s no limit on how many archived tabs you can have on each machine. However, the sync storage can fit only ≈200 newest tabs.

Say, you archived 250 tabs in one day. The next day, you turn on another computer — it will sync the latest ≈200 tabs only.

How do I disable syncing?

Settings → Sync: Archived tabs

Will I lose all my previously synced data after disabling that?

No.

To set up your first cloud backup:

1. Settings → Backup, Import or Export
2. 
3. After signing up, you should see something like this:
   

You can access your backup as long as you have access to your email inbox.

If you set a password, your data is end-to-end encrypted. The password (or its hash) never leaves your device. However, If you forget your password, your backup is unrecoverable, even by us.

Backups are stored securely so that if the cloud storage is ever compromised, attackers cannot access user emails or decrypt any data. The data is encrypted using AES-256, an industry-standard encryption algorithm.

To export all archived tabs to a *.tabs.json file

You can also export a window: right-click on the window bar → Export...

Drag-drop your *.tabs.json file into the Archived section.

You can also open all of them by dropping into the open tabs section.

From OneTab

OneTab exports tabs as a list of URLs. You can copy/paste them to Tab Cellar (Settings → Backup, Import or Export).

1. Click on the gear icon to open settings
2. 

You can open websites using Tab Cellar instead of your browser’s search bar.

Why

Tab Cellar Chrome prioritizes your open tabs and history, while Chrome’s address bar shows search results 1st:

Chrome	Tab Cellar

Here, I want to focus on the already opened Gmail tab, but Chrome only gives me Google Search results.

Tab Cellar remembers what you selected last and shows it 1st next time:

Tab Cellar also remembers what you selected on Google Search and suggests it directly the next time you search the same query.

Here, I’ve searched “mdn date formatter” on Google before and selected MDN Web Docs link. When I search “mdn”, I can open the relevant link in Tab Cellar immediately.

How

By default, Chrome’s address bar steals the focus. To change that:

1. Navigate to chrome://extensions/shortcuts
2. Find “Open new tab and focus on the search”
3. Click on the pencil icon to set your desired new tab shortcut, such as Cmd-TCtrl-T

This is how I personally use Tab Cellar.

Now Cmd-TCtrl-T doesn’t open new tab in Incognito, how do I fix this?

1. Open extension’s details chrome://extensions/?id=emlopcgmnapeihbnenlcgicbldkadgkk
2. Toggle "Allow in Incognito" on

Unfortunately, without this, Cmd-TCtrl-T doesn’t open any tabs at all.

1. Open a blank tab
2. Click on the gear icon at the top right
3. Enable “Revert to default new tab page”

How do I access Tab Cellar then?

If you don’t have Tab Cellar on the new tab page, you can use Tab Cellar Mini:

Tab Cellar Mini runs in the extension Popup. It doesn’t include some features. Notably, you can’t restore archived windows, sessions, or tab groups from there. For that, you can open Tab Cellar in a new tab by clicking the icon in the bottom left of the popup:

Install another extension after installing Tab Cellar.

This way Tab Cellar won’t override the blank tab page and will continue working otherwise. As of June 2024, this is the only solution I know.