Backtab

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!

Installation

You can install Backtab directly from the Chrome Web Store.

How to Contribute

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.

Getting the Source Code

You can download the latest source code as a ZIP file or use Git:

git clone https://github.com/wrzlbrmft/chrome-backtab.git

Testing in Google Chrome

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:

1. Visit chrome://extensions.
2. Make sure that the Developer mode is active (checkbox in the upper-right corner).
3. Click on Load unpacked extension....
4. 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.

Build Instructions

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.

Private Key

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.

Versioning

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" />

License

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.