FreshStart for Windows

Ever since the invention of tabbed browsing and browsing sessions, we've been waiting for their long-overdue child: fast and functional tab synchronization. FreshStart brings that feature to Google Chrome as a surprisingly zippy extension. FreshStart's workflow isn't necessarily intuitive, but most users should be able to pick it up after one try.

When the extension is installed, it tries to open a welcome page, but that failed for us on both test computers. Close it out and go to your Tools menu, and enable bookmark sync. This will require a Google account, and if bookmark sync isn't active, you can toggle it under the Personal Stuff tab in Options. From there, click the FreshStart button that now appears on your Chrome toolbar and you can toggle which tabs you want to sync. This is especially interesting because you can create multiple saved tab sessions that contain different tabs. You can also customize the name of your session, rename it later, or remove a saved session.

Once FreshStart has been installed on a second computer's Google Chrome, you can restore a saved session either by merging it with the existing open tabs, or opening it into a new window. In Chrome's global extension options menu, you can also enable a crash recovery that saves your tabs every 5 minutes. FreshStart's name doesn't really seem to relate to its function, but its features work great and make this a great extension for users with multiple computers.