Backtab either jumps back to the page from which you opened the current tab, or re-opens it if you have already closed it. This works no matter how long ago you closed the page (Chrome itself only remembers the last 10 closed tabs incoherently).
If you do a lot of online research, reading through documentation, browsing discussion groups or just Wikipedia, you most likely end up with a lot of open tabs. At some point you end up in a tab asking yourself:
Where is the page from which I opened this tab?
Simply click the Backtab icon!
You can install Backtab directly from the Chrome Web Store.
Feel free to join and help me improve this extension. Here are a few ideas:
- Translate it into other languages.
- Port it to other browsers like Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer.
You can download the latest source code as a ZIP file or use Git:
git clone https://github.com/wrzlbrmft/chrome-backtab.git
If you want to test your contributions in Chrome, you can load the extension directly from its source directory. First, download the source code as described above. Then open Chrome and follow these steps:
- Visit
chrome://extensions
. - Make sure that the Developer mode is active (checkbox in the upper-right corner).
- Click on Load unpacked extension....
- Navigate into the
src
directory of the source code and select it.
Whenever you updated a file of the extension you have to reload it in Chrome.
To do so, simply visit chrome://extensions
again and hit Ctrl+R.
Actually, there is not much to build unless you want to write your own extension
based on this one. For that, I added a buildfile for
Apache Ant, see build.xml
. It helps you create the
ZIP file which you have to upload to the
Chrome Developer Dashboard.
To build the ZIP file, navigate into the top directory of the extension and run
ant zip
or simply
ant
NOTE: Make sure you already have a private key, if not see Private Key.
The ZIP file is then located in the build
directory.
To clean up after a build, run
ant clean
This will not delete the private key file of course.
In order to build a ZIP file using Ant, you have to have a private key for the extension. To create one follow these instructions.
Rename the private key file to key.pem
and make sure it is in the top
directory of the extension. You do not need the .crx
file, so it can be
deleted.
The version number of the extension is maintained in the Ant buildfile
build.xml
and only copied to manifest.json
of the ZIP file during the build
process.
To change the version number, open build.xml
and edit this
line:
<property name="version" value="0.1.0" />
This software is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3.
The icon is taken from the realistiK Reloaded icons pack designed by Pavel InFeRnODeMoN distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3.