A project by Team NOVUS | Colossal-a-Pitch Finals
Introduction
Almost everyone who works or studies on a computer has faced this problem: too many browser tabs open at once.
One tab has documentation, another has a GitHub repository, a few contain research papers, and others are related to completely different tasks. When it’s time to switch projects or close the browser, finding everything again can become frustrating.
This made us think about a simple question: What if we could save our entire browser workspace and return to it whenever we wanted?
That is the idea behind Cloud Workspace Launcher, our project for the Colossal-a-Pitch hackathon finals.
The Problem We’re Trying to Solve
Modern work often involves switching between different tasks throughout the day. A developer might move between coding, debugging, reading documentation, and researching solutions. Students face a similar situation when managing assignments, lectures, and research.
Although browsers provide ways to reopen tabs and organize them into groups, rebuilding a workspace can still take time. Important pages can get lost among dozens of open tabs, and restoring a previous working context isn’t always as convenient as we’d like.
We wanted to make this process easier and help users spend less time managing their tabs.
Introducing Cloud Workspace Launcher
Cloud Workspace Launcher is a browser extension designed to let users save, organize, and restore their browser workspaces with a single click.
Instead of manually reopening pages and arranging tabs every time they return to a task, users can save a workspace and bring it back when they need it.
The goal is straightforward: make it easier to switch between projects without losing the context of what you were working on.
Key Features
- Save and Restore Workspaces The extension captures essential browser information, including tab URLs, pinned statuses, scroll positions, and supported form data. Users can restore a saved workspace in different ways, including opening it in a new window or alongside their existing tabs.
Sensitive information such as passwords and payment details is excluded from the captured form data.
- Preserve Chrome Tab Groups Tab groups help users keep related pages together. Cloud Workspace Launcher is designed to preserve group details such as titles, colors, and collapsed states when saving and restoring workspaces.
This helps maintain the organization users have already created in their browser.
- Flexible Storage Options Different users have different preferences when it comes to storing their data. The project’s storage architecture is designed to support multiple approaches:
Local storage: Keep saved workspace data on the device.
Firebase Cloud Firestore: Support cloud-based synchronization through its REST API.
Custom server endpoints: Allow integration with other storage systems.
This modular approach gives the project flexibility to support different use cases and deployment requirements.
Exploring AI-Powered Improvements
We also identified opportunities to make workspace management smarter through AI.
Intelligent Workspace Naming
Saved workspaces often end up with generic names that don’t explain what they contain. An AI-based naming feature could analyze tab titles and website URLs to suggest meaningful names such as “Web Development Research” or “API Integration.”
The idea is to make saved workspaces easier to identify without requiring users to name everything manually.
Predictive Tab Restoration
Restoring dozens of tabs at once can consume significant system resources. We’re exploring an approach in which AI identifies the most relevant tabs for resuming a task first, while less important tabs remain unloaded until needed.
This could help users return to their work more quickly while reducing unnecessary initial resource usage.
These AI-powered capabilities are part of our planned enhancements and implementation roadmap.
Technical Approach
The project is designed as a browser extension using Chrome’s extension APIs and a modular storage architecture.
Some of the technical elements described in our project design include:
Chrome extension APIs for managing tabs and browser windows.
Chrome’s local storage facilities for offline workspace storage.
REST API requests for cloud and custom-server integrations.
AI model APIs, such as Gemini or Vertex AI, for proposed intelligent features.
Chrome’s tab-discarding API for resource-conscious restoration.
The project also considers privacy and performance. For example, the proposed AI workspace-naming workflow sends only tab titles and origin URLs rather than full page contents or captured form data.
Our Hackathon Experience
Working on Cloud Workspace Launcher for Colossal-a-Pitch has given Team NOVUS an opportunity to think about an everyday problem from a practical engineering perspective.
We believe useful software doesn’t always have to solve a huge problem. Sometimes, improving a small part of someone’s daily workflow can make a meaningful difference.
The project has also encouraged us to think beyond the basic functionality of a browser extension and consider how storage flexibility, privacy, performance, and intelligent features can work together.
We’re excited to continue developing the idea, learn from feedback, and explore how the extension can become more useful.
What’s Next?
Our next steps include continuing the implementation of the planned AI features, improving the workspace restoration experience, and refining the storage and performance architecture.
We would also like to learn how developers, students, and other people who work with many browser tabs manage their own workflows.
If you could add one feature to a browser workspace manager, what would it be? We’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.
Thank you for reading about our project!
Team NOVUS
Colossal-a-Pitch Finals
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