When you may want to share a browser window with a peer(say to share research materials), you mainly copy the urls and paste it into a text file or directly into the chat; something like WhatsApp. But that too becomes much tedious when working with a lot of tabs and recurring urls.
Additionally bookmarks and browser sync preserve links, but they don’t preserve window context — tab order, multiple windows, tab groups, pinned tabs, or metadata.
.portab is a file-based format (.portab / .sportab) that exports one or more browser windows into a single portable file. The goal is to make browser sessions transferable across OSes and browsers in a structured way. In summary, to ease transportation of browser window(s) with ease.
There’s currently a WebExtension implementation for Firefox and Chromium-based browsers that can export and import sessions.
The long-term idea is to treat this as an open format that browsers could potentially adopt natively.
I'm keen to gather traction as I believe this should be a native feature in browsers and am open to critical feedback. I’d be curious to hear if others have run into similar portability limitations or if there are approaches I’ve missed.