You might have heard about the ailment called ‘Too Many Tabs’. It afflicts most of us who just love to drink from the water hydrant that’s the web; so we don’t really care about how many browser tabs we have open. Well, that’s like catching all the water spewing out with just a spoon; but let’s leave that discussion for another day. Let’s focus on the digital syndrome called ‘Too Many Tabs’.

Tab management is an essential skill for anyone who is out mining the web for information. More than two dozen tabs is par for the course. What’s not fun to observe is the reaction when you lose all those tabs because of some reason or you would like to maintain the layout of the same tabs across your browsing sessions.

Did I hear ‘layout’? Say no more, because the Chrome Web Store has just the solution for the pickle you could find yourself in when you have so many browser tabs and windows opened up.

Layout Manager – Simplicity Personified

Layout Manager in my humble opinion is a feature that Chrome or all browsers for that matter should have as a default. It not a complicated piece of work (I just could use two screenshots)…it simply allows you to save and maintain the open windows and tabs so that you can quickly reload them whenever you want. More importantly, the selling point for the extension is: It remembers the precise layout of the windows and tabs you have open and it restores them exactly.

Here’s how the extension appears on the toolbar after the install. As you can see it has just two buttons:

You can position your tabs in a specific order and arrange the windows according to the screen estate before clicking on Save Window Layout.

Load Window Layout brings back the same layout whenever you want to. Every tab and window is retained in its exact position.

Let’s look at a couple of real-world situations and see how Layout Manager comes to the rescue.

As a quick bookmark tool: You have a few tabs open in Chrome. You need to quickly close the browser and go for a cup of coffee. Now, instead of saving the browser URLs and them copy-pasting them later, you can use Layout Manager to backup all your open windows and tabs and restore them later with a click.

As a space saver: You have quite a few tabs and windows open in Chrome in specific positions on the screen. You need one or two tabs and not all of them immediately. Save their layout and load them later with Layout Manager.

Is Layout Manager Different From Other Session Saving Extensions?

Arguably Firefox is better with tab management. But Chrome too has its bevy of tab management extensions. There is the heavily used Session Manager extension among them. The key difference is that Session Manager does not allow the preservation of the exact layout though it brings back the opened tabs.

Layout Manager is uncomplicated. It has just two buttons and nothing else to configure. It resembles the cross-browser add-on called Surfon which we have previously reviewed, but again without the layout feature. I can see Layout Manager to be a handy inclusion for web designers who like work with multiple open windows and keep them positioned them on the screen precisely. A feature to save multiple sessions would have really taken this extension places. But even without that, it has found a cosy place on our Best Chrome extensions page. Do you think this uncomplicated and simple extension is worth an install? Tell us.