Live migration of tabs from firefox to chrome

A year ago Firefox would basically stall when some 20 odd tabs containing misc. web pages were opened, which of course wouldn’t do.

I love firefox for its extensibility, but it has suffered from some serious scalability issues in the past, especially during periods of research when I may have 30-50 tabs open at once. So last year I decided to install Google Chrome for the first time and its scalability was nothing short of impressive. However chrome did lack the number one aspect which makes firefox indispensable, the gigantic addon ecosystem and the power to morph the browser into whatever you like, thus showing you the web through the lenses you personally fancy.

In order to get the best of both worlds, I decided to write a little firefox addon which would address the odd days when I’m doing extensive research, by allowing migration of the large set of opened material off of firefox and onto chrome, so that I could bring the tab count down to a level FF could cope with, thus allowing for continued use of FF as main browser during further research. For this use case I’m leveraging chrome more or less as a form of temporary page archive for the current session, which is more conventient than bookmarking 50 tabs and then having to selectively swap subsets in and out of the browser session.

A year later I realized there might be one or two people out there with similar challenges, so I decided to go through the Mozilla publication process, a process which took orders of magnitude more time than actually creating the addon.

About the plugin

The addon simply iterates all opened tabs and sends them over to Chrome via process-to-process communication. This little fact I think is important since I myself don’t trust internet services outside my own control, and that the obvious way of solving this issue would have been to create a pub/sub solution with a central server coordinating browser tab states between Chrome and Firefox… a design I explicitly did not choose to leverage. So for other tin-foil-hat wearing people, knowing that the tab migration is performed entirely on your own machine, without any out- or inbound network calls, might be an important tidbit.