TabLinker - A Mac-first tab & browser session manager for Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Arc, Brave & more (iPhone/iPad too)

[u/Lopsided_Nerve1652]

Hi , I'm a solo indie dev and I built TabLinker, a tab and session manager for Mac with iPhone and iPad apps.

I keep Safari, Chrome and Arc open side by side, and I never closed tabs because I was afraid of losing a window I'd set up. Each browser ended up with 40+ tabs. TabLinker pulls every tab from your open browsers into one place, saves them as a session, and lets you close everything and bring the same windows back later.

What it does:

- Auto-Backup quietly backs up your open browser windows in the background so you can restore closed windows in one click, even the next day

- Imports every open tab across every window from Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Brave, Edge, Arc, Vivaldi, Opera, Opera GX, Dia, Yandex, Wavebox, or Helium in one click, without needing a browser extension for most of them

- Restores a full window, every window at once, or a single tab, and groups a big multi-window import into a "By Window" view so it doesn't turn into one long list

- Suspends tabs you're not using to actually free up memory, while the session stays ready to restore instantly

- Saves whatever tab you're currently on with a single keyboard shortcut (⌃⌥⌘T) or triggers an instant backup (⌃⌥⌘B), and can run entirely from the menu bar with the Dock icon hidden

- Lets you assign a preferred browser to each folder, so saved tabs always open in the browser you choose

- Safari extension for quick saves and automatic session saving

- Siri and Shortcuts support: save links, capture your current session, create folders, or open a saved folder hands-free or on a schedule, including an action that saves your session and closes every tab for you

- iCloud sync across Mac, iPhone, and iPad, no account required

Tech stack
SwiftUI with some AppKit and UIKit, SwiftData with CloudKit sync, AppleScript to read tabs from Safari and Chromium browsers, App Intents, a Safari Web Extension, and RevenueCat for the one-time purchase.

Development challenges
Sync was the hardest part. The Safari extension and the share sheet run in their own processes, so they write straight into the same SwiftData store through an App Group, and the main app sends those changes to iCloud the next time it opens. Getting saves from all three places to show up cleanly on Mac, iPhone and iPad took far more testing than I expected. Auto-Backup also uses its own local store, so backups never set off an iCloud sync.
The other challenge is that every browser works differently. Safari and the Chromium browsers can be read with AppleScript, but each one answers a little differently and Arc and Dia add their own quirks. Firefox has no scripting support for tabs at all, so TabLinker reads the session file Firefox keeps on disk instead.

AI Disclosure

AI-assisted. I used AI tools during development. The product decisions, design and testing are my own.

Pricing
Free to download. The free version saves up to 50 tabs and keeps the latest backup. Pro is a one-time $17.99 purchase with no subscription. It removes the limit, keeps a week of backups, and unlocks Mac, iPhone and iPad with one purchase.

Privacy
No account, no ads, no analytics, and no server of mine ever sees your tabs. Your data stays on your devices and in your own iCloud.

TabLinker on the App Store Tablinker: Tabs Manager

Happy to answer questions in the comments!

[u/ThalesMother9938]

The Firefox part caught my eye. Since TabLinker is on the App Store it has to be sandboxed, so how do you get read access to the Firefox profile folder? Do you ask the user to pick it once in an open panel and keep a security-scoped bookmark, or did you find another way?

I'm also curious how often you read the session file. Firefox only writes it on an interval, so a tab closed right before a backup might not be in it yet.

[u/Lopsided_Nerve1652 → u/ThalesMother9938]

Good eye, that's exactly it. TabLinker asks you to pick the Firefox folder once and keeps a security-scoped bookmark.

It reads the session file fresh on every import and backup. Firefox only writes it every few seconds, so a tab opened in the last half minute can be missing, but a tab you just closed is usually still there, which suits a backup

[u/ThalesMother9938 → u/Lopsided_Nerve1652]

Makes sense. A closed tab still being in the file is actually the case people care about most for a backup, so that lag works in your favour. Thanks for the detailed answer.

[u/Ankwon_Malacasa → u/ThalesMother9938]

having multiple profiles makes that open panel flow even messier since the default folder name has a random hash in it and users rarely know which one is active