Dec 25, 2022

How To Transfer Safari Tabs To Chrome on iOS

#ios #web #browsers #howto

I am finally making the switch from iOS Safari to Chrome iOS, because I switched to Chrome on Desktop and it finally got inconveninent enough to have split browser histories. One of the first problems I ran into is that I had 70+ open browser tabs in Safari that I didn't want to close. On Desktop, I prefer to close out all tabs at the end of each day, but on my phone, I let them hang out for a long time, and use them kind of like bookmarks or "read later". I also have a lot of tabs open from clicking links in other apps that I don't close just because it's easier to switch apps, rather than close the tab.

In any case, I wanted to transfer these tabs over and didn't see an easy way to do it. Someone suggested to first bookmark all the open tabs and that worked beautifully.

Some of the steps came from hidden menus though, so here's what I did:

  1. Add Bookmarks for all open Tabs in iOS Safari

    You can do this by long pressing the Bookmarks icon in the bottom menu bar

  2. Sync bookmarks to desktop (which already happens through iCloud) and then export bookmarks from Safari in Desktop. This gives you an HTML file and you can bookmark them in Chrome. There are lots of articles on Exporting/importing bookmarks across browsers on the internet, so I'm going to be lazy and not show screenshots of this.

  3. Once imported in Desktop Chrome, ppen all bookmarks in tabs. This UI is in a right click menu (and possibly elsewhere in Chrome).

    You will want to open the specific subdirectory with the saved tabs, but this is also pretty easy to do.

  4. Now that you have all tabs opened in Desktop Chrome, the last step is to get them opened in iOS.

    Chrome shows you open tabs on other devices if you're signed in, which I was. From there, you can long press to open all those tabs on your mobile device. This was also a hidden menu that took me a while to find.

And there it is! All 70+ tabs from iOS Safari are now open in iOS Chrome. (They're also open in desktop Chrome now, but I closed those out).

  1. As a bonus, I then closed all open tabs in iOS Safari by long pressing the Tabs icon in the bottom menu

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