How-to use Google Chrome to visit all of your needed webpages in a few clicks

For people like myself who occupy a significant amount of time browsing the internet, it can be a hassle to constantly re-open a multitude of websites that one would go to-and-fro from with every internet session. People browsing with Google Chrome can cut down on the time it takes to set of an open series of websites for a particular task: e.g. blog writing, following the news, comparing prices across web retailers, etc.

Configuring your startup pages

The most simple way to do this for a given set of webpages, ideally made up of websites that you visit the most upon opening your browser (e.g. email, news, banking, etc.) is to set a series of pages as your starting session. The easiest way to do this is the following:

1. Have a single Chrome window open and have as tabs all of the websites you wish to visit immediately upon starting up the program.
2. Go to the “Options” menu (select from the drop-down menu that appears when you click on the wrench icon in the upper right).
3. Select the “Basics” tab and make sure the “Open the following pages” option is selected.
4. Click on the “Use current” button.
5. Click on the “Close” button.

Using Session Buddy to set up multiple pre-saved sessions

I have installed the “Session Buddy” extension for Chrome to allow me to save and name multiple browsing sessions (e.g. see my “Video” session in image above) that can be opened with as few as three clicks of the mouse. To do this:

1. Ensure that you have installed Session Buddy – you can find it HERE – When installed, the icon for the extension (see image) should be to the left of the “Control the current page icon” in the upper right.
2. Open all the websites you want in a given session as tabs in a single window or a combination of multiple windows with tabs.
3. Click on the Session Buddy Icon to go to the Session Buddy tab
4. Name your session in the box to the right of the text: “Current Session”
5. Click the “Save” button.
6. To open a saved session – go to the Session Buddy tab, select the session you want on the left column, and click the “Restore” button.

You can repeat this for as many session you which to create. You can also modify and delete existing sessions using the tab for the program. The one limitation with this extension is that it has to be installed on every computer you wish to use it on. You cannot “sync” your saved sessions with your Google account as you can with your bookmarks in Chrome. Hopefully, this will be rectified with future versions.

Do you find extensions like Session Buddy useful? Do you use Chrome with any extensions at all? Please let us know in comments.