Questions, answered.

It's a Chrome extension that bundles every tab-related capability Chrome's APIs offer — search, suspend, group, dedupe, save sessions, highlight, mute, capture, drag between windows, per-tab notes, sleep timers, auto-refresh, and 30+ more — into one fast, keyboard-first UI.

If you've ever installed five different tab extensions to do five different things, TabSmarter is the one that replaces all five.

It's free. There's no premium tier, no paywalled features, no "lite version." There are also no ads, no affiliate links, no sponsored content, and no accounts required.

The catch, if there is one: TabSmarter doesn't try to monetize you. We're not building a SaaS on top of your tab data. The extension runs entirely on your machine.

Google Chrome 116+ is the primary target. It also works on Chromium-based browsers — Brave, Microsoft Edge, Arc, Opera, Vivaldi — that ship Manifest V3 and a recent enough chrome.tabGroups and chrome.sidePanel implementation.

Firefox is not supported today (its extension API differs significantly). A WebExtensions port may happen if there's demand.

From the Chrome Web Store: the listing is pending — link will appear on the homepage once it's live.

From source (today):

1. Download or clone the repository
2. Open chrome://extensions
3. Toggle Developer mode on (top right)
4. Click Load unpacked and choose the TabSmarter folder
5. Pin the toolbar icon

None. Not "anonymous usage stats." Not "crash reports." Nothing.

The extension reads your tabs, your bookmarks, and your history because that's literally what it operates on. None of it is sent anywhere.

See the Privacy Policy for the long version.

Chrome's permission system is granular — every API surface needs to be declared up front, even if a feature is opt-in. TabSmarter touches a lot of APIs because it does a lot.

Quick summary of what each permission unlocks:

• tabs, tabGroups, sessions — the core stuff
• bookmarks, history — the bookmarks/history search inside the manager
• storage — saving your settings (synced across devices via your Chrome account)
• alarms, idle — auto-suspend and auto-backup timing
• notifications — opt-in alerts
• contextMenus — the right-click menu
• sidePanel — the optional side panel view
• scripting, activeTab, <all_urls> — the TabTint highlight overlay
• favicon — high-quality favicons in the manager UI
• tabCapture, downloads — screenshots and exports

It syncs your settings via Chrome's built-in storage sync (the same mechanism that already syncs your bookmarks). It does not sync your open tabs, browsing history, or saved sessions — those stay local to each machine.

If you want cross-device sessions, that's a feature we're considering, but only as opt-in and only ever using Chrome's sync, never our own server.

Tab lock (no close): the tab can't be accidentally closed. If you (or a misclick, or a closing-window keyboard shortcut) closes it, TabSmarter immediately reopens it at the same window, position, group, and pin state. No password — just an undo-by-default safety net.

Password lock (with overlay): the tab (or every tab on a domain) gets covered by a blurred overlay until the right password is entered. Use this for the laptop-on-the-couch situation, not for protecting your bank account.

It's a casual deterrent, not a security feature. The website / privacy policy / homepage all repeat this on purpose.

What it actually does:

• Hashes the password with SHA-256 + a per-lock random salt before storing it
• Stores hashes in chrome.storage.local only — never synced to the cloud, never sent off your machine
• Injects a full-screen blurred overlay at document_start that covers the page

What it can't do: it can't stop someone with developer tools, an extension that disables other extensions, or someone who simply opens an incognito/Guest window. The page is loaded normally underneath the overlay; the overlay is "just DOM."

If you need actual security, encrypt the data, lock the OS, or use a separate browser profile. Don't use a tab-manager extension as your only line of defense.

Yes. Password locks live in chrome.storage.local on your machine and survive browser restart. The "this tab is unlocked for the rest of this session" memory does NOT — it lives only in the service worker, so closing the browser (or even just leaving it idle for ~30 seconds) re-locks the tab next time.

You don't lose them. Toggling Focus Mode on saves your current window as a session called "Focus stash …", then closes every non-active, non-pinned, non-locked tab.

Toggling Focus Mode off opens those tabs back up in the current window — skipping any that are already open so you don't get duplicates — and deletes the stash.

The snooze entries are stored in chrome.storage.local. On the next time the service worker starts (which happens on browser launch, on the next tab event, etc.), TabSmarter re-arms each pending alarm based on its remaining time.

If a snoozed tab's wake time has already passed while Chrome was closed, it'll wake up the moment the alarm fires after you re-open Chrome — usually within a few seconds.

It's a rolling log of which tabs you opened and closed, with timestamps. It's stored entirely in chrome.storage.local, capped at the last 1,000 events.

It is not synced anywhere, not sent anywhere, and you can clear it at any time from the Activity view in the manager.

MV3 service workers don't get a clean "browser is exiting" event, so we approximate. Every few seconds (debounced) TabSmarter writes a snapshot of your open windows and tabs to local storage. On the next browser startup, if that snapshot is recent (under a week old) and had at least 3 tabs, TabSmarter saves it as a session named "Last session before …" and posts a notification with a link to restore.

It's not a substitute for Chrome's own "On startup → Continue where you left off" — but it's a useful belt-and-braces backup if Chrome crashes.

Yes — that's the whole point. The link is a data:text/html;base64,… URL containing a self-contained HTML page that lists the tabs and has an "Open all" button.

It does not require the recipient to have TabSmarter installed. It does not phone home. It is just a webpage encoded into the URL itself, which is also why the link can get long for big collections — there's no server in the loop.

It calls Chrome's built-in chrome.tabs.discard() API. The tab stays visible in your tab strip but its DOM, JavaScript, and memory footprint are released. Click the tab to wake it — it reloads from the network or cache.

Suspended tabs typically use less than 1 KB of memory each, vs ~50–200 MB for an active tab.

Yes, several ways:

• Pin the tab (pinned tabs are never suspended by default)
• Add the domain to your whitelist in Settings
• Tabs playing audio are skipped (configurable)
• Tabs with unsaved form input are skipped (configurable)

No — Chrome doesn't allow extensions to directly customize the tab strip's appearance. TabTint highlighting works inside the page (a coral ring + dim overlay), not on the tab strip itself.

The closest thing to "tab strip customization" we can offer is the toolbar icon's tab-counter badge.

A session captures the entire state of a window — every tab, in order, plus pinned status, group membership, group colors, and even the window dimensions. Restoring a session opens a brand-new window that looks exactly like the one you saved.

Bookmarks are individual URLs without ordering, grouping, or state. Both have their place. TabSmarter integrates with bookmarks too — bulk-save selected tabs to a bookmark folder.

Defaults (bound out of the box):

• Alt+T — Open the manager
• Alt+S — Suspend the current tab
• Alt+P — Pin or unpin the current tab
• Alt+D — Find and close duplicate tabs
• / — Quick-switcher palette (inside the manager)

These are unbound by default but can be set at chrome://extensions/shortcuts:

• Mute / unmute current tab
• Save current window as session
• Add current tab to group
• Toggle Focus Mode
• Lock / unlock current tab against close
• Snooze current tab
• Open the quick-switcher palette directly

Chrome only allows four keyboard shortcuts to be pre-bound by an extension; any beyond that have to be assigned by you, which is also why you can change the four defaults if you want.

First, try opening chrome://extensions, finding TabSmarter, clicking service worker to open the dev console, and looking for errors there.

If you can reproduce the issue, please open a GitHub issue with:

• Chrome version (chrome://version)
• OS
• Steps to reproduce
• Anything in the service-worker console

Open chrome://extensions, find TabSmarter, click Remove. All settings and saved sessions stored locally are removed with it.

Settings synced via Chrome's storage will eventually expire on Google's side; nothing of yours sits on our servers because we don't have any.

Maybe! TabSmarter's design philosophy is "include everything Chrome's tab APIs make possible, in good taste." If your idea fits that, the answer is probably yes.

If your idea is "add AI / cloud sync / collaboration / a paid tier" — the answer is probably no, but we're happy to talk about why.