Browser extension to sleep a tab for a specified amount of time?

March 13, 2011 6:29 PM

Anyone know of an extension (Ff/Chrome) that will 'sleep' (close) a tab for a set amount of time (say x days) and wake it up (re-open it)?

There is surprisingly nothing, not even discussions, that come up in a search for stuff like "browser tab sleep wake" or "browser extension tab sleep wake".

posted by kjhosein to computers & internet (6 answers total)

I've looked through a lot of Chrome's extensions and never seen anything like that. There is, however, the Daily Links extension (Daily Coffee for Firefox) that you can set to open a preset group of tabs each day of the week. It's not automatic; you do have to click the icon to bring up the links.
posted by JV at 6:40 PM on March 13, 2011

Hm. It'll probably be impossible to do EXACTLY what you want (ie. with an extension), although I think you could whip up something that comes close using either a scheduled task in Windows, or a Cron job on Mac/Unix.

What exactly are you trying to do, and what platform are you on? Also, if you have a strict IE/Firefox/Chrome/Safari preference, be sure to tell us.

On a vague hunch, you could write a short Greasemonkey script for to automatically close the tab after a specified interval (or use Tab Wrangler in Chrome).

To re-open it, you could set up a Cron job or Scheduled Task, which would be especially useful, as it'd still work if your browser was completely closed. Extensions stop running the second that the browser closes. (This also has the added bonus that you can schedule your machine to wake up if it is sleeping when the job is set to trigger)
posted by schmod at 6:43 PM on March 13, 2011

what would such an extension be useful for?
posted by kenliu at 7:01 PM on March 13, 2011

@schmod Chrome 10 has a new feature called Background Pages that keeps an extension running in the background when the browser itself is closed.

I'm pretty familiar with the Chrome Extensions API, and I think it would be pretty straightforward to build what the OP is describing.
posted by kenliu at 7:58 PM on March 13, 2011

So here's a concrete example of what this could be used for:

Let's say you run across an article that mentions that they'll have a part II soon, and they either specify the date or not. With a 'tab sleeper', you could just set that browser to 'wake up' after say 2 days to see if there's anything new.

What I'm thinking is that I can save myself some time and trouble in having to copy the URL and add that and a note to my to do list manager.

As for preference, either Firefox or Chrome would be fine.

As an aside, what I tend to do now is leave those tabs open as 'to dos' but I've also discovered that I (like many other people) suffer from cluttering killing my productivity and overwhelming me, so I'm trying hard to minimize the number of tabs I have open at any given time.
posted by kjhosein at 3:15 PM on March 17, 2011

There are zillions of tab management extensions that can help you manage the tab clutter problem.
posted by kenliu at 6:06 PM on April 9, 2011