Why switching used to hurt

A tab manager earns its keep by holding tabs you do not want open right now. After a year that can be hundreds of pages, sorted into lists you built by hand. Leaving the tool means leaving them, or spending an evening reopening each one and saving it again somewhere else. That is why so many people keep an extension they have stopped liking.

Every major tab manager can export its data to a file, though. And Nest now reads those files directly: you export once, import once, and the lists arrive as sessions. This guide covers each tool’s export, what its file does and does not contain, and how the import works. The whole thing is free and needs no account.

Before you start

  • Keep the old extension installed until you have checked the result in Nest. An export never removes anything from the old tool.
  • Export to a file you can find again, such as your Downloads folder. The file name does not matter; Nest recognises the format by its contents.
  • Do not expect what the file does not hold. OneTab’s text export has no group names or windows; Session Buddy’s has folders but no group names or colours. Nest’s preview tells you exactly what is missing before you import.

Exporting from OneTab

  1. Open the OneTab page (click the OneTab icon).
  2. Choose Export / Import URLs near the top.
  3. Copy the text in the export box into a text file and save it. Each line is one tab; a blank line separates two groups.
  4. OneTab 2 can also save an HTML file from the same page. Nest reads that too, and it keeps the group labels, which the text does not.

Each OneTab group becomes one Nest session. The text export has no group names, so sessions are named “Imported” and numbered; rename them afterwards by clicking the name. OneTab’s stars, locks and sharing links do not travel.

Exporting from Session Buddy

  1. Open Session Buddy and go to Settings, then Export.
  2. Choose a collection, or all of them, and pick JSON. CSV works too but carries less: no pinned tabs, no groups.
  3. A full backup file (the one Session Buddy makes from its backup page) also works, in both the version 4 and the older version 3 format.

Each Session Buddy collection becomes one Nest session, and its folders become windows. Links that shared a group in Session Buddy arrive as one group, but Session Buddy stores no group titles or colours, so the preview says “Group names aren’t in this file” and the groups come back grey and unnamed. Pinned tabs survive in the JSON export.

Exporting from Tab Session Manager

  1. Open Tab Session Manager, then its settings.
  2. Under Backup, choose Export sessions, which writes a JSON file.
  3. If you have “Save tab groups” turned on in Tab Session Manager, the file includes each group’s title and colour and Nest keeps them.

This is the most complete file of the four: windows, pinned tabs and named, coloured groups all travel. Each saved session becomes one Nest session with the same name and date.

Exporting from TabGroup Vault

  1. Open TabGroup Vault and choose Export.
  2. Pick JSON for the most complete file; Markdown and CSV are read too.

Each group becomes a session with its title and colour. The JSON export of the saved library keeps pinned tabs; Markdown does not mark them.

A Chrome bookmarks file

If you parked tabs in a bookmarks folder instead, Chrome’s bookmark manager can export everything as an HTML file (the three-dot menu, then Export bookmarks). Nest reads it: each folder becomes a session, named after the folder. Bookmarks carry no windows, groups or pinned tabs, and the preview says so.

Importing into Nest

  1. Install Nest if you have not, and open it. Go to Backup.
  2. Press Import, next to Export, and choose the file.
  3. Read the preview. It names the tool it recognised (“Found in this Session Buddy file:”), lists each session with its tab, window and group counts, and lists what the file cannot carry.
  4. Untick anything you do not want. A long list shows fifty rows at a time.
  5. Press Import N sessions. Nothing is written before this step.

The imported sessions appear in Saved Sessions like any other. They do not count against the free plan’s three sessions: everything you import is kept, and the limit only applies to new sessions you save yourself. Updating an imported session from the tabs open now makes it one of yours; renaming it does not.

Limits worth knowing: one import takes up to 2 MB of sessions at a time, and offers the rest right after; a session holds up to 500 tabs, so a bigger OneTab group arrives in parts named “part 1 of 3” and so on; links Nest cannot open (chrome:// pages, file paths) are counted and left out.

After the import

  • Open a few sessions with Choose… to spot-check the tabs without opening all of them.
  • Rename the “Imported” sessions from OneTab while you still remember what each list was.
  • Export from Nest once as JSON. From now on that file is your portable copy, structure included.
  • Then uninstall the old extension, if you are done with it. Its export file stays on disk either way.
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Nest imports OneTab, Session Buddy, Tab Session Manager, TabGroup Vault and Chrome bookmarks, free, with a preview before anything is written.

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