You have a lot of tabs open, many of them important, but not important right now. Sounds like a familiar scenario? Well, with a few cool extensions, you can close those tabs right now and set them to auto-open at a later time.

Apps are slowly gearing towards working on your time, not making you work on theirs. Mailbox is a good example of how you can snooze emails to open them later. So why should your browser be left behind?

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Tab management is a big problem on any browser. Plus, you can actually speed up your browser by reducing the number of tabs. Thankfully, new extensions on Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox are ready to let you switch off a tab when you want, and open it automatically in the future.

Chrome: TabSnooze and Page Snooze

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TabSnooze is the prettier of the two extensions, and mimics the look-and-feel of Mailbox's email snoozing options. There are seven options for the app to smartly choose a time for you: Later today, This evening, Tomorrow, This Weekend, Next Week, In a Month and Someday. You can also manually pick a date and time. When you click one of these options, the tab will be closed; and opened automatically later at the time of your choosing.

Before you start using it, you should dive into the settings and fix the app to your preferences. In here, you can choose what time your work day starts and ends, so TabSnooze won't start a tab when you aren't working. You can also set the definition of "Later today" and "Someday" in here. In fact, the extension can also be set to recommend snoozing a tab after a certain amount of time has passed.

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As with most Chrome extensions, you can customise the keyboard shortcuts. Alt+L will bring up a list of all the snoozed tabs in your bookmarks folder, where you can also delete them if necessary.

TabSnooze also has a mini task app to set your to-do list reminders, but it's quite underwhelming. If that's what you want, we'd recommend sticking to any simple to-do list app for Chrome.

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While SnoozeTabs does exactly what it is supposed to do, there is an alternative in case you don't like it. Page Snooze works from the context menu. Right-click anywhere on a web page, and choose to snooze a page for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 days, or a week or two. That's all you get though, there is no customising these time intervals. Obviously, PageSnooze is the weaker of the two extensions and we would recommend SnoozeTabs, but hey, to each his own.

Firefox: SnoozeTabs and TabAlarm

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The SnoozeTabs extension for Firefox is unrelated to the TabSnooze Chrome extension, but looks the same. But it's not as easy to use and has some bugs.

Like the Chrome extension, you can snooze a tab for Later today, Tonight, Tomorrow, This Weekend, Next Week or Next Month. These are also two more options called "Rainy Day" and "When I'm free"—but there is no explanation of when or how these activate. Our snoozed tabs in either are yet to show up. There's also another option to pick a date, but it doesn't work; in fact, it breaks the app and you'll have to uninstall and reinstall it. Of the two Firefox add-ons, we'd avoid this painful, buggy app.

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TabAlarm [No Longer Available] does not look as good as SnoozeTabs, but in actual functionality, it is far superior. Right-click on a page to create an alarm, choose a date and time, and whether you want the page to be repeated (daily, weekly, monthly). That's a neat feature which even SnoozeTabs for Chrome does not offer. This might just become yet another one of those extensions Firefox users love that no other browser has.

You can also dive into TabAlarm's Options to see the full schedule, edit or delete as you see fit, clear completed items, and even duplicate an entry if you desire. While not as pretty as any of the others, TabAlarm is definitely the most functional extension in this list.

What About Other Browsers?

Eyal Wiener, the developer of TabSnooze, told us he is bringing his extension to Safari and Firefox soon, as well as Chrome on Android and iPhone. Users on Opera should already be able to install the Chrome extension—it's just one of the many reasons to love Opera. Internet Explorer users, hard luck, maybe it's time to finally change your browser.

Image Credit: chriki7274, Michael Malone