Ever since I installed Ubuntu on my machine, I've needed more than ever to find ways to synchronize installations of programs I frequently use. Xmarks worked so incredibly well until it recently started giving me countless errors, as did Swimming Session, on Google Chrome. Then came TabCloud in my search and boy, was I relieved that someone had thought about tabs sessions in different machines and browsers, specifically Chrome (which means it works for Chromium as well) and Firefox.

TabCloud is an open-source extension that you can use to save sessions and restore them later on another installation of the supported browsers, even across machines and OS's.

It's been working unbelievably nicely when I use Chrome in Windows, and Chromium on Ubuntu. Now, with Quix solving the bookmark keywords issue, and TabCloud to share links, working in different OS's isn't such a pain.

TabCloud for Chrome can be found here, while the experimental Firefox plugin can be downloaded here [No Longer Available]. You have to sign in with your Google account to get started.

Saving Your Sessions

Once you've installed this extension and have signed in with your Google account, you can explore the two options available from right-clicking the icon.

You can choose to restore sessions either in the current tab or in a new window. You can also choose whether or not to go through a confirmation dialog when you delete saved sessions or close a window.

So when you're ready to save a session, you have to first click on the TabCloud icon, and then on the disk icon, which then saves your tabs. You can easily confirm what you're saving by looking at the available favicons. You can type a name for the particular session or leave the session name blank, which TabCloud autofills with the date and time of the saved session.

Managing Your Sessions

You can also drag and drop the favicons to reorder them, but this is only available on Google Chrome.

Even if you don't remember so well what site the favicon represents, you can just hover over the favicon to see a tooltip with the title of the site. You can also click on any one icon to jump directly to that website.

After you start saving more and more sessions, you can of course delete any of them, but in Firefox you won't be able to get a confirmation dialog, like you can in Google Chrome.

Android smartphone owners will be happy to know that there's an official TabCloud app, so you can continue exploring the same topics you had on your desktop browser, just on a tinier screen. Meanwhile, iOS users can bookmark the iPhone-friendly page.

The main selling point of this amazing extension is that you can very easily save your most current tabs. Xmarks, and even Google Chrome, Firefox and Opera natively can sync your whole bookmark collection but when you're using different browsers and want to continue browsing the last set of tabs you had on your work computer or a library machine (with your portable installation of Chrome or Firefox) at home. TabCloud is a remarkable plugin that helps ease the pain that is working across different operating systems and browsers. Its interface is so simple and easy-to-use that you'll definitely want to tell your friends about it so they too, can have a more enjoyable time working on different machines.

What apps do you use to share links across computers? Let us know in the comments!