Devlog - Tab Collection Manager (TCM)

I used the Toby Tabs extension for years. It’s genuinely good at the thing it does. I end up with a pile of tabs whenever I’m deep in a topic or working through a set of tools, and when I move from one topic to the next I want to close all of it and get it back later, or save a group of related links as a bundle for a project.

Sometime in 2024 they started deprecating features to push people onto a paid Pro plan. Someone probably bought the company and wanted a quick return off users who depend on it. I’m not having it, and Chrome extensions are a joke to create, so I wasn’t going to get screwed over a workflow I’d relied on for years.

So I built my own

Tab Collection Manager. It took one day.

It has every feature I used Toby for: saving groups of tabs as collections and restoring them later. The one thing it doesn’t have is sync. I could build it, but there were tradeoffs I didn’t care enough about to take on.

It’s snappier than Toby, and better than most other tab collection extensions I’ve looked at, because they all get bloated with features until they’re absolutely ridiculous. It’s on the Chrome Web Store and you can use it.

The known rough edge: export is a little wonky, and one of the export buttons doesn’t work. You can still export everything.

There are a couple of features I’d like to add someday, and it’s about one cloud coding session of work. I haven’t felt the pull, because it already does exactly what I need it to do.

Why I’m not monetizing it

I made this for me and for future me. Tools at this scale should be made for yourself, and it’s only getting easier. It won’t be long before a non-developer can produce a simple Chrome extension. I’m not saying they’ll be shipping hosted applications, but an extension is low-hanging fruit and it isn’t hard.

I do want more eyes on my tools, just not more money from them. Visibility buys connections and goodwill, and I like knowing something I made ended up in someone else’s toolbox and gets used. For an application that took almost no time to build, that’s enough.

The part that angers me

The greed is rampant and everything has to be monetized.

Shame on Toby specifically, for leaning into monetization by taking things away from long-time users. Not just deprecating features, but shutting off your ability to reach your own saved tabs and collections on a deadline, rather than grandfathering people onto a legacy plan or at minimum letting them keep access to what they’d already saved. Plenty of people never saw the notification emails. I don’t know whether they walked it back. Either way it’s bad tactics and it’s just greed.