This simple extension makes it easier to get things done with Google Chrome

We've all been to tab hell: those times when you're staring at a couple dozen tabs, fresh off a Wikipedia or news-reading binge, unsure of what it was you were trying to do in the first place.

Aside from being a mess to navigate, this can also make your laptop feel sluggish. With the wrong device, keeping a web of tabs open may chew up resources that bring your notebook to a crawl. And it could be especially annoying with a web browser like Google Chrome, which, despite recent improvements, can still be a memory hog at its worst.

Fortunately, there are ways to organize your clutter that don't involve closing your browser completely.

One of those is OneTab. It's a free Chrome (and Firefox) extension that's been around for few years now, but is still one of the easiest ways to make handling tons of tabs less stressful.

Using OneTab is simple. After you download it for the desktop, all you do is click the little icon to the right of the address bar. Then, OneTab will quickly collapse whatever you have open into a tidy list of links in its own tab. When you want to open a particular page back up, just click the appropriate link. If you're done with a page, just strike it off the list. It cuts down the mess and the memory usage.

That alone is useful, but OneTab is particularly handy if you want to stash those tabs for later. Here's an anecdotal example: Previously, when doing research for an article, I would manually copy and paste any relevant links into an Evernote note. Pretty slow. Here, though, I collapse all those links into a single, shareable URL. When it's time to get back to work, it's a much tidier process picking up where I left off.

Beyond that, you can name separate groupings of tabs to better distinguish them, choose whether or not you want pinned tabs to be included when you collapse everything together, and make it so only certain tabs get sent to OneTab instead of merging them all at once. The point being, it's fairly well-thought-out.

The only real downsides are that: 1. Re-opening a tab doesn't bring back that tab's browsing history, and 2. Chrome already has a built-in "Bookmark Open Tabs" option that can be used fairly similarly. Something like OneTab is more streamlined than that, though - with Chrome, you'd have to go back and delete the folders of bookmarks you've created.

Either way, if Chrome's been beating down your laptop too often for comfort, a tool like this might be able to help.

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