How can I transfer all of my open tabs in Chrome in Android to Chrome on a desktop?

Question

I know that I can go to history section in desktop and there I can locate the history of android tabs separately and then can open the tabs one by one.

But I want to transfer all of my current Android session to desktop at once without going through the arduous process of locations URLs in history one by one and then opening them.

Solution 1

Use Tabs from other devices on the left of History (you can go straight to chrome://history/syncedTabs), click on Open all in menu (⋮) on the right.

Solution 2

A somewhat working solution is found here:
https://dev.to/piczmar_0/when-you-never-close-tabs-on-your-mobile-chrome-browser-2boj

I wonder if it preserves the order of the open tabs, this is crucial for me.

# First enable USB debugging on phone and connect via USB
# Then install android developer tools

# Verify device is connected and permissions granted
./adb devices -l

# Connect to Chrome Android's legacy debugging API
./adb forward tcp:9222 localabstract:chrome_devtools_remote

# Visit http://localhost:9222 to verify, then
curl http://localhost:9222/json/list > mobile-tabs.json

Solution 3

The only workaround (if you can even call it that) is refreshing the tabs on my phone, one by one. Then they appear on my desktop. This isn't viable when you have hundreds of open tabs on the phone.

Solution 4

A clunky partial solution is to connect your phone to a computer over USB and use Chrome devtools to view the list of tabs open on the phone. This seems to get all the tabs, not just the recent ones.

Caveat: Titles and URLs are each truncated to the first 100 characters if they were longer than that. For example here's a tab whose title and URL are truncated to 100 characters:

Research shows natural language benchmarks don't measure AI models' general knowledge well | Venture…
https://venturebeat.com/2020/08/12/natural-language-benchmarks-dont-measure-ai-models-general-knowle…

The truncation isn't ideal, but 100 chars of title + 100 chars of URL is often still enough to find the page again in a search engine. The tabs seem to be in roughly the same order as the tab switcher, with occasional exceptions.

Steps

Follow https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/remote-debugging/ for the full details of setting up remote devtools, but the high level steps are:

1. Enable USB Debugging on your Android device.

2. Go to chrome://inspect#devices in Chrome on your computer.

3. Ensure the Discover USB Devices checkbox is enabled.

4. Connect your Android device to your computer via a USB cable.

5. Accept the Allow USB Debugging prompt on your Android device (if applicable).

6. Open Chrome on your Android device.

7. After a few seconds, a list of the titles and URLs of all open websites on your phone should appear in the chrome://inspect#devices tab on your computer. Copy-paste the list to a text file.

View more solutions

Comments

[Tom Anderson]

This only shows the tabs that have already been closed. I don't feel that it answers the question of "current session".

[Tom Anderson]

Actually, I changed my mind. I think it answers the question but it's incomplete. If the tabs are too old, they don't show up in the list, but we can use the workaround suggested by @Luke Flegg. Also, stale entries appear in the "Tabs from other devices" list.

[Tom Anderson]

I agree that this is an answer. The "Tabs from other devices" response by @Hex does work but only if the tabs aren't too old. If they are too old, then this workaround can fix it. I just refreshed 134 tabs on my Android. It took around five minutes so it is possible to do but very annoying.

[Ferran Basora]

I just found a solution to avoid the annoying process of refreshing all tabs one by one. If you go to your Google Android settings section and you click in your Google account preferences (the avatar), you can force a toggle on/off/on to get all the tabs synced.

[lifebalance]

@FerranBasora "Google Android settings" - where is this? on the mobile?

[waldyrious]

As @TomAnderson says, this only shows a list of recent tabs, not the list of actually open tabs. In other words, there's no correlation to whether the tabs are currently open or have been closed, only to whether they've been recently visited.

[Muhammad Umer]

where exactly are we talking about here

[Ev0oD]

@lifebalance I think FerranBasora meant Account settings. Usually in Android settings you can find accounts that are synced. Like Microsoft live accounts or Google accounts. When you locate the google account you use for your chrome, you open its sync settings and find "Chrome". Turn that off and on again — force sync. Worked for me with over 100 tabs

[ankit]

@TomAnderson Update: Now it works for all tabs - old and new alike.

[ankit]

Now no longer do we need to update tabs. The problem is finally sorted.

[Zeel SHah]

@ankit How is it sorted? Can you elaborate? I wanted to sync links and update visited and not visited accordingly.

[ankit]

@ZeelSHah Now, you don't have to reload mobile tabs to see them. Just go to chrome://history/syncedTabs and you can find all your mobile tabs there.

[timhc22]

Oh my gosh, you just saved me years of wasted time. Thank you so much lol.

[Ivan Vučica]

As of October 2020, this still shows only a tiny fraction of open tabs for me -- the ones that were recently loaded. If I was asking the question, I would not accept this answer.

[James EJ]

Wow, amazing solution!

[Underlines]

The new feature of Tab Groups messes with chrome://history/syncedTabs. All the tabs in groups don't show up at all, only tabs that are outside of groups :(

[Underlines]

Amazing. This is the only solution that works with ALL tabs, unlimited numbers, including the new Chrome Mobile feature of "Tab Groups"! Copying the json list into an editor and a bit of regex magic, I got it into an excel in a few minutes.

[dev_willis]

It's ironic that Google's core competency is search but it's rare that I can find anything I'm looking for in my browser history.

[Garrulinae]

Works brilliantly. Thanks for this (and to Marcin Piczkowski for originally documenting the idea)!

[Adrian]

FYI they seem to be discussing removing this feature: bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1232509 They are leaning away from providing a human-friendly interface for "security reasons" and towards an API approach intended for use by automated testing tools and such. The localhost:9222 page is marked as deprecated, and they recommend using chrome://inspect instead. While that does provide a list of all currently-open tabs, it does not currently provide the full URL of each open tab, at least not in any human-friendly way I can see. We will need a new solution soon.

[Ted Taylor of Life]

How is this solution even relevant. This does not answer the question at all.

[Jonta]

@TedTaylorofLife As stated "For those who can switch browsers". Seeing this method might move someone in the direction of using a different browser

[MiG]

Perhaps there was a bug that has been fixed since, because right now it works exactly as intended. I had about 700 tabs open on my (Android) phone, and 'open all' in a new window on my (Win10) desktop transferred all of them. This may be four years old, but thanks a bunch for the suggestion :)

[MiG]

Fyi, the accepted solution above requires no hassle at all and works exactly as intended - it immediately copies ALL open tabs from the phone to the desktop!

[John Mellor]

It's definitely worth trying that first, but in my case on a 2 year old phone chrome://history/syncedTabs only opened the most recent ~30 tabs (of ~900). I didn't try anything fancy like toggling sync to force a refresh; perhaps that would have helped. (FWIW I have tab groups enabled, but was missing ungrouped tabs too.)

[Admin]

As of 9th May 2022, it still works. I had more than 500 tabs and wanted to save them. Huge thanks for this