I always have too many tabs open. Chrome's tab strip turns into a row of tiny icons and I can't tell which one is which anymore.
There were already a few similar extensions, but none of them really felt right to me. So I thought, why not make my own? And if I'm making one anyway, I want it to make tab management a bit more fun for people who use Chrome for work or just for fun.
That's Tabumaru, a Chrome extension that shows all your tabs and tab groups in the side panel. ("Tabu" is from tab, and "maru" means "round" or "whole" in Japanese. Kind of "all your tabs, rounded up".)
What it does
The basic part is simple. Every tab and tab group is listed in the side panel, groups first in their own colors. You can search by title, URL or group name, and press Enter to jump to the first match.
You can drag tabs around in the list and the real tab order in Chrome changes too. Drop a tab on a group and it joins the group.
Then there are a few things I added because I needed them myself:
- Auto-sleep. Tabs you haven't touched for a while get discarded to free memory. The panel shows roughly how much memory you saved.
- Tab lifespan. This one is my favorite. Tabs you don't visit slowly get paler in the list. When their time is up, you can keep them or close them. If you're brave, it can close them automatically (they're saved in a list so you can reopen them).
- Snooze. Hide a tab until tomorrow morning or next week, and it comes back on its own.
- Duplicate tabs. It counts them and closes the extras.
And there's an octopus at the top. It comments on how many tabs you have and looks sad when a tab "dies". I'm not sure it's useful, but I like it. 🐙
Some things I learned
The side panel has a minimum width. It's about 320px and an extension can't make it narrower. I tried switching to a popup window instead, but on my Linux setup (Chrome on Wayland) the left and top of chrome.windows.create are ignored, so I couldn't put the window next to the browser. I went back to the side panel and added a "simple mode" that shows only favicons in two columns.
captureVisibleTab only captures the tab that's currently visible. I wanted screenshot previews in the hover card, but you can only take one of the active tab, and pages like the New Tab page can't be captured at all, even with the permission. So the preview fills in as you visit tabs, and the card says why when there's no image.
I drew the octopus with a Python script. I'm not good at drawing, so the SVGs are generated: the legs are cubic Bézier curves for the right side, mirrored to the left. It took more tries than I want to admit.
Privacy
Nothing leaves your browser. No analytics, no server, no network requests. Settings and snoozed tabs are stored locally with chrome.storage.
Try it
It's free on the Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tabumaru/jhjohbgplbogmhlkjkafakgnclgpfkia
How many tabs do you have open right now?
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