A few months ago, Tab Wise was just a browser extension I built to solve a problem I was facing every day.
My browser constantly had dozens of tabs open. Work tabs, documentation, articles, random ideas, GitHub repositories, and things I planned to read "later".
Like many developers, I convinced myself that keeping everything open was a productivity system.
It wasn't.
Try Tab Wise today: CLICK HERE
Eventually I decided to build a Chrome extension that would help me organize tabs without changing how I worked.
That side project became Tab Wise.
Today it has:
400+ installs
External contributors
A public website
An open-source codebase
Multiple production releases
The interesting part, however, wasn't the code.
It was everything around the code.
Building the Extension Was the Easy Part
Initially I thought the challenge would be Chrome Extension APIs, state management, and building a responsive side panel UI.
Those problems were relatively straightforward.
The harder questions were:
Which features do users actually care about?
How do you make an extension trustworthy when it requires tab permissions?
How do you document a project for contributors?
How do you decide what belongs on a roadmap?
How do you encourage feedback?
The engineering work was only one piece of the puzzle.
The Features Users Actually Wanted
Like many side-project developers, I started by building features I thought were useful.
Then people started using the extension.
And they immediately asked for things I hadn't prioritized.
The most requested capabilities were:
Saved Sessions
Users wanted to save entire browsing workspaces and restore them later.
Not just URLs.
They wanted:
Pinned tabs
Tab groups
Complete browsing context
That eventually became one of the most valuable features in the extension.
Duplicate Cleanup
I underestimated how many duplicate tabs people accumulate during a workday.
A simple way to identify and remove duplicates ended up being surprisingly useful.
Recently Closed Recovery
People regularly close the wrong tab.
Providing a quick recovery workflow turned out to be more important than I initially expected.
Open Sourcing the Project
You can start contributing here: CLICK HERE
One of the biggest decisions was making the project open source.
Open sourcing is often described as simply making a repository public.
In reality it required:
Contributing guidelines
Security policy
Issue management
Discussions
Documentation
Release notes
The code was already there.
The surrounding ecosystem had to be built.
The first external contribution was a small moment, but it completely changed how I viewed the project.
At that point it stopped being just my project.
It became a project that other people were willing to spend time improving.
Privacy and Trust Matter More Than Features
One interesting piece of feedback came from someone who reviewed the codebase.
Their observation was that the biggest privacy concern wasn't data exfiltration.
It was local collection.
A tab-management extension naturally has access to:
URLs
Titles
Activity information
Session data
Even when that information never leaves the user's device, it still represents sensitive browsing metadata.
That feedback reinforced an important lesson:
Users don't just care about features.
They care about understanding what the software is doing and why.
What I Learned
Building Tab Wise taught me that shipping software is only part of product development.
You also need to think about:
User feedback
Documentation
Privacy
Distribution
Release management
Community building
The difference between a side project and a product isn't the amount of code.
It's the amount of responsibility that comes after the code is written.
What's Next
The project is still evolving.
Current areas of focus include:
Better session management
Improved onboarding
Additional productivity insights
Community contributions
Documentation improvements
If you've built a browser extension, SaaS product, or open-source project, I'd love to hear what surprised you most after launch.
Because for me, the biggest surprise was discovering that building the software was only the beginning.
Top comments (0)