While searching for reference material in the cafe, I usually saved the complete webpage as an HTML file (with all its associate files in a separate folder) on the college computer and used a pen drive to carry the data to my computer for offline referencing. Though the process of saving webpages is easy (just hit the Ctrl+S button) I think if I had ZipTabs back in those days, my work load would have reduced a lot. ZipTabs is an extension for Chrome which can save your opened webpages in HTML format with all the images and CSS information and zip them all in a single archive with an excellent compression level. Step 1: ZipTabs requires SingleFile Core, a page processor extension, to work. Thus if you don’t have it already, download and install the latter before you install ZipTabs. Step 2: After you have installed both the extensions, I advise you to restart the browser. If you have any unsaved work open in your browser, save it and restart your browser. Step 3: Now, when you want to zip your tabs, click on the ZipTabs icon in the Chrome extension area. The extension will load with all the open tabs in a list with a checkbox against each of them. Select the tabs you want to zip and click on the Zip button. Step 4: Give the zip file a name and click on the OK button to start the process. The process will now start and will display the process in percentage in the ZipTabs icon. Step 5: Once the tabs are zipped successfully it will be saved in the default download directory of Chrome. If you need to read these files in the future you can simply extract it and double-click to load it on your browser even when you are offline. The page will contain all the images, HTML and CSS details and will look like the page you were reading when you were online. According to the developer, once you have saved a zip file you can open all the zipped pages at once using the Choose File button, but the button never worked for me. If it works for you, do share it with us.
My Verdict
If you are on a slower machine, you might see some slow down in the response time of your computer while the zip file is being created. I also encountered some failed operation errors while testing the application, but once I restarted the browser the problem was fixed. Overall, ZipTabs is an amazing extension to save bundles of webpages open in the browser for offline referencing in one click. You can use it if you are in a situation where you have to use a public computer to do research and need to carry the data in a portable drive.
