Recently I’ve been dealing with a lot more tabs and windows in Chrome, my web browser of choice. Cluster is a Chrome extension that allows you to sort your windows and tabs, as well as quickly see an overview of various windows you have open. Sorting options are available, as well as the ability to quickly sort tabs, and multiple other features.
Firstly, Cluster allows you to view your various windows in one interface, as well as seeing all the tabs in those windows. Cluster can be brought up via a keyboard shortcut, which can be customised, and you can also set it to appear as a pinned tab. When activating Cluster via keyboard shortcut, it automatically places the cursor in the search tool that Cluster has, so you can search through your tabs with no mouse needed.
Cluster allows you to sort your tabs via the menu, sorting them by domain level, and allows sorting on the interface. You can sort your tabs by name, or by domain, which allows you to group them like the cover photo on this post. One thing that was annoying was that whenever a search was performed, the sorting was removed, so need to reapply it – something that will hopefully be fixed in the future.
Each tab and window can simply be clicked in Cluster, allowing you to really quickly and easily bring up the tab or window that you want.
Bulk management of tabs is also handled well by Cluster. You can select various tabs, or a whole window, and click to move them to a different window or a new one. You can also merge windows, as well as save tabs to saved windows.
Speaking of saved windows, this is incredibly useful for people who often do the same tasks – such as writing or research. Saved windows allows you to save groups of tabs that you want to come back to, or frequently use. For example, a student may have a saved window of various research pages that they frequently want to access. Or, a programmer may have StackOverflow, Github, and various other pages that they want to quickly be able to open. Saved windows allows you to save these pages into a window that can quickly be opened up whenever you want.
If you are running Chrome on a low end system, you’ll know the struggles of Chrome eating all your RAM and CPU usage. Well, Cluster can help you there – it gives an option for you to suspend tabs, which will prevent them from running in the background until you click on them. This can also be handy on laptops, allowing you to run less processes and therefore save battery.
Finally, a feature worth mentioning, Cluster allows you to export your tabs to CSV and JSON. This isn’t something I’ve found the need to use, however some people may find this helpful in order to integrate with other tools.
There are a few things I would like to see, and issues with Cluster however. The features page mentions the ability to use drag and drop to move tabs between windows and create a new window, however I found no ability to do this when using the app. In addition to this, a preview mode for each tab would be nice, allowing you to quickly preview what is in tabs. Another nice addition would be the ability to sort tabs into custom groups.
Cluster is completely free to use, but there is an option for a $9.80 one time purchase that allows you to sync your saved windows to the cloud, which may be useful for those with multiple computers.
To conclude, Cluster is an awesome tab manager that makes managing multiple windows and tabs a breeze. I love the ability to quickly sort my tabs, as well as search them, and save windows. Cluster is available on the Chrome Store here.