TabZen · Chrome extension · Open sourceReady to download
Your tabs, filed into spaces.
All of it stays on your machine.
What it is
TabZen turns a pile of open tabs into a set of named spaces. Save a space in one click, restore it later exactly as you left it. Drag to reorder, and hit ⌘K for a command palette that lets you run the whole extension without touching the mouse.
I built it because every tab manager I tried either shipped my browsing data to a server or hid the useful parts behind money. TabZen does neither.
Five permissions, zero host access, fonts bundled inside, and it never makes a network request. Uninstall it and the data leaves with it, because there is no server it could have been left on.
What it does
Spaces and sessions. Save the tabs you have open into a named space and bring the whole set back in one click.
Command palette. Hit ⌘K, search any space or action, jump straight there.
Tab sleep. Tabs you are not using go to sleep, so a heavy session stops eating memory in the background.
Sorting and duplicate merge. Tabs sort by domain and duplicates collapse, so the same page never sits open five times.
Archive and stats. Old spaces go to an archive instead of getting deleted. The stats view shows how tabs and sessions pile up over time.
Seven colour themes. Small thing, but you stare at it all day.
Numbers
- 5,136 lines across 24 files, with one store feeding four surfaces: the new tab page, the Chrome side panel, the toolbar popup and a context menu item.
- The smart sorting is a local heuristic over domain lists. No AI, no network, nothing leaving the machine.
- My own two-month count, 17 March to 23 May: 3 saved tabs across 2 sessions became 207 across 18. Biggest single session was 63.
- The built extension is 636 kilobytes, and the install archive is 348.
Getting it
It is not in the Chrome Web Store yet. For now it installs by hand from the archive, which is four steps and about a minute.
- Unzip the file you downloaded.
- Open chrome://extensions in your browser.
- Turn on Developer Mode, top-right corner.
- Click Load unpacked and pick the unzipped folder.
The source is MIT and lives on GitHub.
Repository on GitHub