Idea: TabShare, a browser add-on to remotely access your tabs

I made a quick tweet about this the other day and want to elaborate on the idea, in the hopes that someone else might pick up on it and build it. To my knowledge, there’s nothing out there yet that does quite what I have in mind. I’ve seen Agglom, but it’s not nearly a

Imagine being a tab-a-holic and frequently having a lot of browser tabs open on multiple machines. Now imagine being at the office, at home or somewhere on the road when you don’t quite remember that one thing that you forgot to bookmark, but know is still an active tab in another browser session somewhere where you’re currently not. For the sake of argument, imagine also that you can’t VNC/remote desktop/screen share into that other machine and just want a quick and easy way to find that one URL in a specific open tab. You just know that the link you want is open in another browser and it’s driving you mad that you can’t remember it.

What would really be handy in cases like this is a browser add-on (Firefox extension or otherwise) that kept ‘tabs’ (heh) on your open browser tabs and periodically uploaded a snapshot of everything you’re looking at somewhere to the cloud. Then you could easily access that list on another machine and selectively visit a specific site or quickly open some or all of them all at once. If you break down the list by each computer you decide to install the add-on on, you’d be able to pick recently open tabs from machines like ‘Home desktop’, ‘Office main machine’ or ‘Macbook’ even if they’re currently offline or powered down.

The key here is that this add-on is smart enough to save you from your own stupidity of forgetting to otherwise bookmark an important site via something like Delicious where you could just access it from anywhere. Some services like Agglom let you save and share lists of tabs, but they require a concious action to do so.

Now I’m also not talking about the recently defunct Google browser sync, or the upcoming Mozilla Weave. Without loading them up by default, this add-on would allow you to preview the titles and URLs of everything that’s open on another machine and let you decide what to do next. Sometimes you might be on certain corporate or insecure networks where you don’t want to actually load up a particular URL, but you still want to pass along that site to someone else. If you do want to visit one of the saved tabs right there, then great, you can load it up straight away too, but give me options as to what to do with each tab’s info. You could even offer complete browser syncing for those who truly want to keep tabs on all their machines 100% identical.

For those overly paranoid or sensitive enough, it would offer a fully editable blacklist of sites or URL fragments never to share to the cloud at all. On the other hand, if you’re one of those Internet exhibitionists that wants to live a completely open life and broadcast to the world what kind of porn they’re currently browsing, there could even be an option to share your current tab snapshot live with everyone.

Taking things one step further, you could even connect to others with some sort of shared browsing mode, where all of you access the same tab data and changes are pushed out in quasi-real time to everyone. Great for online meetings or other online collaborations.

One of the first hurdles you’re going to have to tackle is where in the cloud to store the tab data. Being a casual Firefox extension author you don’t suddenly want to become responsible for providing a backend infrastructure for this little add-on or incurr privacy concerns by users who want full control of where the data is kept. Ideally, users would be able to bring their own storage space by providing MobileMe, Amazon S3, WebDAV or other shared disk access, similar to what OmniFocus offers right now to sync its tasks. This would let you discontinue support easily when you want to move on and develop something else and not leave users hanging with no access to their tab data.

If you’re on the go and need to access your tabs from a machine that you don’t call your own, a quick web access to look at all your registered browser session. Amazon’s EC2 services perhaps? JungleDisk uses that as part of it’s My JungleDisk feature e.g.. Come to think of it, this would be a great feature that someone who’s already offering cloud services of bookmark services like Rackspace or Xmarks to offer.

There you go, Internet. A great idea to run with. Sound like something you want to code? By all means, build it! Just give me some inspirational credit for and let me know when it’s ready to test out. Maybe I need to bait some people. Hey Chris Finke, you like to write Firefox extensions. Maybe you could tackle this one?