Most "open my work apps" tutorials online point you at Automator or Shortcuts. Those work for opening apps. They don't bring back your browser tabs, they don't put your windows where you had them, and they don't switch your Focus Mode. If you only ever work on one project, that's fine. If you switch between two, three, or five different projects in a day, opening blank apps isn't the same as being ready to work.

Every time you switch between projects on your Mac, your browser tabs disappear or get mixed up with other tabs.

You close Chrome to focus on a new client. When you come back, those 12 research tabs are gone, buried in history, or merged into a different session. You don’t just lose tabs. You lose context.

macOS was never designed to understand projects. It understands apps. It understands windows. But it does not understand that a set of tabs belongs to a specific piece of work.

Ikuna solves this at the system level. It saves your browser tabs as part of a named project context and restores them when you switch back.

No extensions. No bookmarking workflows. No reconstruction.

The best macOS workspace manager depends on what problem you're solving. Window positioning, workspace switching, or full project context persistence are three different needs served by different tools. Ikuna saves your complete project environment (apps, tabs, windows, Focus Mode) and restores it when you switch projects. BetterStage combines window tiling with named stages and AI-powered layouts. Spencer saves window layouts across virtual Desktops. Rectangle snaps and resizes windows. Stage Manager groups open windows visually.