Quick start — save, restore, repeat

This page takes about two minutes. By the end you’ll have saved a session, closed the tabs, reopened them, and seen TabControl put your browser back exactly as you left it.

Pick any project or rabbit hole you’re currently working on — ten to thirty tabs is a good size for your first test. Pin a couple if you normally do.

Click the TabControl icon in Safari’s toolbar. In the popup, click Save & Keep.

You’ll be prompted for a name. Type something memorable like First test — delete later and hit Return.

The session now appears in the list. The row shows the name you gave it, the date, and the number of tabs and windows captured.

• Captures every tab’s title, URL, pinned state, active state, and mute state for every window.
• Records whether each tab was discarded (suspended by Safari) at the moment of capture.
• Writes all of that to a local SQLite database inside the TabControl App Group.
• Leaves your current Safari windows untouched — nothing closes, nothing changes.

If you wanted to save and clean up after yourself, you’d use Save & Close (⌃⌥W), which saves the same data and then closes the captured windows.

Close your Safari window(s) the way you’d normally close any window. Close them all. Take a breath.

Open the TabControl popup again. Click the session you just saved. Click Restore.

Safari opens a new window (or several) and reloads every tab. Pinned tabs come back pinned. The tab that was active when you saved becomes active again. Discarded tabs come back discarded — they load when you click them, not before.

That’s the main workflow. Most of TabControl’s other features — categories, AI analysis, tab suspend, iCloud sync — are variations on the same idea: capture state, and get it back later.

• Save a session — the full list of what gets captured and the subtle difference between Save & Keep and Save & Close.
• Restore a session — restore a single tab, a whole session, or something you deleted by mistake.
• Tab suspend — free up memory automatically without closing any tabs.
• Keyboard shortcuts — all four defaults and how to rebind them.