One click close
Largely thanks to the Incognito Window feature, Google Chrome is a favorite browser for people sneaking, creeping and snooping around the Internet.
These users will rejoice at the announcement of PanicButton, a new extension that allows you to hide all your tabs at once with one single button and restore them later.
All roads lead to close
When installed, the PanicButton extension allows you to close all your tabs with a single button, either an icon in your Chrome toolbar or a keyboard shortcut.
After the PanicButton is clicked, it turns from red to green and allows you to reopen the closed tabs.
It also saves the taps you closed in a new bookmark folder to be re-opened later, if you so desire. You can set a password to prevent others from reopening the tabs, too.
Disappearing browser
While the intentions of PanicButton are up to interpretation, the fact that it is made by a company called HideMyAss.com removes a lot of questions.
If you don’t get where we’re going, it’s probably primarily meant for hiding “adult videos.”
More than just coverin’ your ass
There are, of course, other uses for the extension. Perhaps you’re on Facebook snooping on ex-boyfriends or co-workers and don’t want anyone to see.
Maybe you just have a lot of tabs open, realize you’re late for something, and need to quickly close and save all of them.
When I was in college, there were lots of times when I was doing research, needly to quickly close my laptop to run to class, and probably would have benefitted from quickly being able to bookmark all the tabs rather than just hoping they’d all still be open when I got back to work later. Other extensions exist for this though that aren’t pitched in such a furtive way.
You gotta have options, kid
OneTab is one competitor, which works by converting all your open Chrome tabs into a list, rather than actual tabs, that can then be restored individually or all at a time after they’re closed.
There’s also TooManyTabs, which turns your tabs into a dropdown window to preview all your tabs. It also can be configured to save a list of all your opened pages in a spreadsheet in your Google Drive to be opened later.
If you’re more concerned about maxing out your memory than being overwhelmed with lots of tabs, Tab Hibernation might be right for you. It automatically puts all your other tabs to sleep, meaning they won’t reload or slow down your browser unless you’re actively visiting them.
Plugging in Panic Button
PanicButton does stand alone in some of the features it provides, especially the fact that it can be prompted with a keyboard shortcut and that your list of tabs can be password protected.
[clickToTweet tweet=”PanicButton has perks, but comes with a bit of a dark shadow over it.” quote=”It has perks, but comes with a bit of a dark shadow over it.”]
Do what you gotta do though, no judgement.
