Opera Tab Vault, Temporary Tabs Storage

Martin Brinkmann
Apr 11, 2011
Updated • Jul 1, 2011
Opera
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6

How do you handle new interesting websites if you do not have time to use or access them right away? Some users like to keep the sites open until they do, even if that means that the website will be open in a tab for a day or two. Others use bookmarks to save the website address which saves some memory but adds the possibility that they forget all about the discovery.

Tab Vault is an extension for the Opera web browser that can probably be best described as advanced bookmarking, or temporary bookmarking. You can add open tabs to the extension's storage which looks on first glance much like another bookmarking folder.

You can move open tabs to the vault to store them there until you delete. The main advantage of this method is that you can close the current tab to save memory and space in the interface.

The extension places an icon in the browser's main toolbar that displays the number of saved websites. So far so good.

A click on the icon displays all tabs that have been previously stored in the vault.

opera tab vault

A left-click loads the selected website in a new tab in Opera, you can use the Ctrl key to open the url in a background tab instead.

New sites are added with a click on the Save Tab link in the extension interface. That's not as comfortable as it could be, a keyboard shortcut or context menu link to add open tabs to the vault would improve the usability of the extension.

Websites that have been moved to the vault stay open by default, you can change that and several other settings in the program options.

All those features until now are more or less available via bookmarking as well. Tab Vault comes with several features that cannot be replicated that easily. It is for instance possible to configure the extension to move stored tabs to the trash when they are opened again.

The extension comes with a tab grouping feature which unfortunately is very limited at this point in time. I'd expect an option to open all tabs of a group at once, but the feature appears to be missing. For now, it only offers to group multiple tabs under a group for identification purposes.

Tab Vault supports the importing and exporting of sessions which may be handy if Opera is used on multiple computers, or if you want to save the tab listing to hide it from other users of the browser.

Tab Vault shows promise but falls a bit short in its current stage of development. The developer could improve the extension by making the adding of open tabs to the vault easier, and by optimizing the tab grouping feature so that all tabs of a group can be opened at once.

For now, it acts like a temporary storage solution for tabs that can more or less be replicated with bookmarks and bookmark folders.

Opera users who would like to take a closer look at the extension can do so at the official Opera extension's repository.

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Comments

  1. Alberto Pignocchino said on May 12, 2020 at 1:17 pm
    Reply

    “Tab Hamster” is the extension that I use currently on Opera for this. It has folders to organize them, and keeps them on Synced Opera storage.
    On Chrome I were using “Sinc Tab Groups” for the same goal.
    [Now I have to try that extension on Opera too (by means of the “Chrome extensions” Ext for Opera) to see if I can retrieve my old Chrome tab groups].

  2. SubgeniusD said on April 12, 2011 at 11:24 pm
    Reply

    I’ve been hoping for a “read it later” type extension for Opera and this looks like it will serve that function.

    Sure beats the awkward “current stuff” bookmark I’m using now — full of months old urls I forget about.

    Why Opera is not the world’s leading desktop browser is a mystery I cannot begin to comprehend…………

  3. Threshold said on April 11, 2011 at 8:14 pm
    Reply

    Panorama in Firefox, for how limited it still it is still better than this and is part of the browser but the best stuff generally comes from extensions and TabGroupManager+Bartab are the only extensions for Firefox that allow me to have an incredible number of tabs (1300) organized neatly in groups easily accessible.

    1. ghehehe said on April 11, 2011 at 9:42 pm
      Reply

      “Panorama in Firefox, for how limited it still it is still better than this”

      Panorama in Firefox is unfortunately over-engineered nonsense. Opera’s tab stacking absolutely kills it.

  4. argo said on April 11, 2011 at 5:51 pm
    Reply

    nice extension that I prefer to “to-read sites” as more reach in features.
    Actually my approach is using this extension for sites I’m still not sure to bookmark definetly instead of using opera sessions which are more uncomfortable to manage,

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