01 Saving a session
A session is a snapshot of one browser window: its tabs, tab groups (names and colors), and their order.
Three ways to save
- From the popup — click the NestarioTabs icon, name the session (or keep the suggested name) and hit Save.
- One click — right-click the NestarioTabs icon in the toolbar → Save this window (or Save all windows). A ✓ flashes on the icon when it's done.
- Keyboard — Ctrl+Shift+S (⌘+Shift+S on Mac) saves the current window instantly.
Save & Close saves the window and then closes it — the fastest way to free memory while keeping everything recoverable.
02 Restoring
- Open the Saved tab in the popup and click Restore (or Restore into this window from the ⋯ menu).
- Choose where the tabs go and whether to open them suspended — suspended tabs appear instantly, use almost no memory, and load only when you click them.
- Groups come back as real Chrome tab groups with their names and colors.
Restoring never deletes the saved session — restore it as many times as you like.
03 Auto-saved — your safety net
Every time you close a window, NestarioTabs quietly saves it to the Auto-saved tab. If the browser crashes or your machine shuts down unexpectedly, the windows that never closed properly are rescued there too, at the next start.
- Auto-saved sessions are kept for 7 days on Free and 90 days on Pro. Your manually Saved sessions are never dropped.
- Found something worth keeping? Use Move to Saved on the entry and it becomes a permanent saved session, free.
04 Workspaces
A workspace is a context — Work, Study, the side project — and every saved session is filed under one. Switch between them from the bar at the top of the popup.
- Create one — workspace bar → +, then give it a name and a color.
- File a session — a session is saved into the workspace you are in at the time. Move it later from the ⋯ menu.
- Unfiled — sessions saved before you had workspaces, or whose workspace you deleted, stay reachable under “unfiled”. Deleting a workspace never deletes the sessions inside it.
- Hand one to a team — on a Team plan a personal workspace can be given to a team, keeping the same sessions.
05 Organizing: folders, tags, notes, pins
- Folders — group sessions into folders (and subfolders). Move a session via ⋯ → Move to folder…, or pull it out with Remove from folder.
- Tags — add free-form labels to sessions and filter the Saved list by them.
- Notes — expand a session and write what it's for; notes are searchable.
- Pin — pin your most-used sessions to the top of the list.
- Search — press / in the popup and search across session names, notes, tab titles and URLs.
06 Focus Mode
Focus Mode puts one tab fullscreen and leaves everything else behind — no tab strip, no other windows in the way.
- Start it — hover a tab in the popup and choose Focus. The tab opens fullscreen in a window of its own.
- Leave it — an Exit Focus button sits at the top of the page the whole time. Esc leaves fullscreen too.
- Your other tabs are untouched, waiting exactly where you left them.
The suggestion
After a long unbroken stretch on the same page — around twelve minutes of genuinely being there, not a tab left open in the background — a small card offers Focus Mode. It withdraws on its own after half a minute.
It is deliberately hard to trigger twice: it waits hours between suggestions, and Don’t suggest for this site silences it for that site for good. Turn it off entirely in Settings → Suggest Focus Mode.
07 Finding things
There are two searches, and they answer different questions.
Search (free)
Matches the words you type against session names, tab titles and web addresses. Fast, exact, and works offline. Use it when you remember roughly what the thing was called.
AI search (Pro)
Press Enter to search by meaning rather than wording. “that pricing research from last month” finds the session even when neither word appears anywhere in it.
It looks through your workspaces, your saved sessions, and the tabs inside them. It cannot find a tab you had open but never saved — nothing unsaved is ever indexed.
08 Keyboard shortcuts
Anywhere in the browser
- Ctrl+Shift+S — save the current window instantly
- Ctrl+Shift+E — open the full manager (side panel)
Inside the popup
- S save · X save & close · / search · , settings · ? all shortcuts
- 1 / 2 / 3 switch between Current, Saved and Auto-saved
Rebind the global shortcuts anytime at chrome://extensions/shortcuts.
09 Sync & backup
Chrome Sync (free)
Turn on Use Chrome Sync in Settings and your saved sessions travel with your Google account between your own Chrome browsers. Chrome Sync has a small storage cap, so very large sessions may stay local — you'll be told if one doesn't fit.
Cloud backup (Pro)
With Pro, every saved session backs up to our server automatically — save it and it's already backed up. Sign in on any browser (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Firefox) and pull your sessions down. Deleting a session locally keeps its cloud copy as a safety net; remove cloud copies from Settings → Account.
Coming from another extension
Settings → Import takes a OneTab, Session Buddy or NestarioTabs backup file and merges it into what you already have. Nothing is overwritten and nothing is replaced — an import only ever adds.
11 Teams
- A Team plan owner creates a team in Settings → Teams (the owner is seat #1; plans start at 2 seats).
- Members join through the team's invite link/code — each member takes one seat. If the team is full, the owner adds seats (prorated) in Plans.
- Everyone shares team sessions in real time: live presence shows who's editing, and roles (member / viewer) control who can change things.
- A seat includes all Pro features for that member — no separate Pro needed.
12 AI credits
The AI features run on credits. Pro includes 300 a month. A Team gets 300 per seat, pooled — five seats share 1,500 between everyone on the team.
| Action | Cost |
|---|---|
| Suggest a session or group name | 1 credit |
| Group loose tabs | 2 credits |
| Search by meaning | 2 credits |
| Run a typed request as an action | 3 credits |
- You are only charged when the AI actually helps. A repeated request served from cache, or one our own software answered on its own, costs nothing — and the extension says so.
- The monthly allowance resets at the start of each billing period, and does not roll over.
- Running out pauses the AI features only. Saving, restoring, suspending, search and everything else keep working.
- Top-ups never expire and are only spent once the monthly allowance is gone. If your plan lapses they are held, not lost, and come back when you resubscribe.
Your balance lives in Settings → Account, and beside the buttons that spend it.
13 Billing, plans & refunds
- Upgrade — Settings → Plans → pick Pro or Team, monthly or yearly. Checkout opens in a secure Dodo Payments tab; your plan activates automatically after payment.
- Switch plans — Pro⇄Team and monthly⇄yearly swap in place with automatic proration; unused time becomes credit.
- Cancel — Plans → Manage billing. Your plan stays active until the period you paid for ends, then drops to Free. Local sessions are never touched.
- Failed payment — you keep your plan for a 7-day grace period while you update your card.
- Refunds — 14-day money-back guarantee on new subscriptions: email nestariotabs@gmail.com.
14 Troubleshooting
Restored tabs look empty until I click them
That's the suspended restore doing its job — tabs load on first click to keep memory near zero. Restore without "suspended" if you want everything loaded immediately.
A group came back without its color/name
Group metadata needs the browser's tab-groups API. Chrome, Edge and Brave fully support it; Opera and older Firefox versions restore the tabs but without group structure.
Sign-in doesn't work
Sign-in uses your Google account in a popup window — make sure popups aren't blocked for the sign-in window, then try again from Settings → Account.
Something looks stuck
Visit chrome://extensions, hit Reload on NestarioTabs, and reopen the popup. Your data lives in browser storage and survives reloads, updates and reinstalls of the browser.
Still stuck?
Email nestariotabs@gmail.com — include what you clicked and what you expected; we answer fast (priority for Pro & Team).