The Arc-style tab butler for Chrome. No duplicate tabs, stale tabs auto-archived (always undoable), tabs grouped by site - or by topic with AI that runs on your device.
Live in Chrome long enough and you drown: the same page opened five times, forty tabs you'll "read later", zero structure. Arc solved this at the browser level - duplicates focus the existing tab, untouched tabs move to an archive, everything stays organized. Chrome never did.
TrueTabs brings exactly that experience into Chrome's native UI. No sidebar of its own, no new-tab page takeover - Chrome stays Chrome, the mess just stops.
This is the setup we recommend, and it is half the product. Chrome can put the tab strip down the left side:
Settings → Appearance → Tab position → Vertical
No such row? The rollout is gradual - open
chrome://flags/#vertical-tabs, set it to Enabled, relaunch, and the row appears. (Verified on Chrome 150;#vertical-tabs-expand-on-hoveris worth a look too.)
Why it matters here: a horizontal strip is where structure goes to die. At forty tabs every title is gone, every group is a nameless colour chip, and the work TrueTabs does is invisible to you. Down the side, each tab keeps its title and each group shows its name and colour - so grouping stops being a tidy-up you take on faith and becomes an outline of your day you can read.
The two halves fit exactly: Chrome renders the list, TrueTabs decides what is in it. Duplicates never take a row. Stale tabs leave on their own. New tabs land in the right group instead of at the end. The order you picked is kept, so nothing jumps. That combination is the Arc sidebar - in the browser you already use.
| Feature | How | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Duplicate prevention | Opening a page you already have focuses the existing tab instantly - a fresh duplicate is pre-empted before it even loads. Any real page counts: websites, local file:// pages, extension and chrome:// pages. Re-typing an open URL into an EXISTING tab works the other way round: your tab wins, the stale copy merges into it (archived first) and the tab is re-filed by your rules. Manual "Sweep duplicates" for the pile you already have. Empty "New Tab" pages stop multiplying too: opening a new one closes the abandoned ones (never the active, pinned or grouped; a just-created blank is a page in flight and is left alone). |
| 2 | Auto-archive | A tab untouched for 24h (configurable 6h-7d, or off) is saved to a local archive and closed. Searchable archive page, restore in one click, notification with Undo after every batch. |
| 2b | What a stale tab gets | One setting, three answers: archive it (the default), unload it from memory (it keeps its place in the strip, reloads on click, and is never closed), or unload first, archive later. Know the trade before you pick: unloading frees memory on the device that does it, closing is what Chrome's sync carries to your other devices, so an unload mode tidies nothing on your laptop or phone. In the unload modes the archive is empty by design and the archive page says so. A note on saved tab groups: Chrome saves and syncs every group, and no extension API can delete a saved group - only you can, from Chrome's tab-group list. The unload modes never empty a group, so they never leave one behind. While another of your machines still runs TrueTabs 1.21 or older, that machine does not know this setting and keeps archiving by its own rule until it updates. |
| 3 | Auto-group | One selector: new tabs group by site (stable colors, clean names) or by topic via AI. Idle groups collapse. One-click "Organize now" for everything else. A site that outgrows its group splits by subdomain - past 5 tabs (your number in settings, or off) console.google.com gets its own group instead of sharing one with your mail, while subdomains holding a single tab stay with the site; shrink it back and the groups merge again a couple of minutes later, or the moment you press Organize. Groups stay honest as you move on: type a new address in a grouped tab and it is re-filed instantly (your rule, the new domain's group, an existing topic, or "Other"); wander off through links and the tab is re-filed only after it settles on the foreign site for a couple of minutes - reading flows are never interrupted. Mark any of your groups protected (the lock on its popup row) and automation never takes tabs out of it. |
| 3b | Smart groups (AI) | Cluster tabs by topic, not just site - on-device Gemini Nano (free, no keys, nothing leaves your machine) or your own API key (OpenAI / Gemini / Grok / a local OpenAI-compatible server like Ollama or LM Studio). Groups appear batch by batch with live progress. With the "Other" catch-all on, nothing is left loose - new tabs that fit no topic join it. |
| 3c | My groups (rules) | Your named groups with routing rules: a site list (deterministic) and/or a plain-language AI hint. Rules outrank every automatic grouping. |
| 3e | "Other" catch-all | With it on, nothing is left loose: a tab that fits no topic, no site group and no rule parks in a grey "Other" at the end. Works with plain site grouping too - no AI required. It is a parking lot, never a decision: a real group always wins its tabs back, and the parking lot re-empties itself when you add a rule or switch modes. Hover it in the popup for a one-click Organize of the pile alone - by rule and by domain in any mode; with AI on it also asks the strays whether they form a topic together. |
| 3d | Order | Two axes: group order and tab order - Manual (you arrange them), A-Z, recently used, or oldest first. Kept live by default: new tabs slot in, manual drags snap back, and recently used first surfaces what you touch. Both live in the popup and in settings. Prefer it on demand? Turn "Keep the order automatically" off and the order applies only when you press Organize. |
| 3f | Bookmark groups (opt-in) | A folder under "TrueTabs" in your bookmarks is a durable group definition: Open materializes it (already-open tabs join instead of duplicating), Update folder pushes the live membership back, and the popup marks a group that drifted from its folder with a dot. Closing tabs never touches bookmarks - the folder is the recipe, the group is tonight's cooking. Definitions travel between browsers through Chrome's own bookmark sync. Uses the optional bookmarks permission, asked only when you switch it on. |
| 4 | Dashboard | Live counts (tabs, duplicates, stale, archived today), one-click actions, merge all windows, master switches per automation. The duplicate count draws the same line the Sweep does: pinned copies (TruePin mirrors one pinned page into every window by design) and the tab you are looking at are never victims, so they are never counted as surplus either. |
Everything here descends from TruePin's "one rule, no surprises" school:
- Undo everything. Every automatic archive batch has a one-click Undo (notification + popup). Sweep victims are archived, not lost. The archive keeps entries 30 days by default.
- Two strikes and it stops. Any automatic action you counteract twice (reopen a deduped page, pull a tab out of a group, expand a collapsed group, restore an archived tab) retires that action for that page/site until the browser restarts. TrueTabs never fights you - or another extension. The popup says when something is retired and takes it all back in one click.
- Circuit breaker. Automatic closes are capped at 25/minute; bulk operations declare exact budgets. Anything runaway pauses ALL automation for 10 minutes and tells you once.
- Settle-then-act. Zero automation during session restore after startup - a restoring session looks exactly like a duplicate storm, so the engine waits until the world is calm.
- Hard no-touch list. Pinned tabs (TruePin territory), the active tab, tabs playing audio, meeting sites (allowlist), your own hand-made tab groups - never archived, never grouped, never closed.
- Apps get to run their own flows. When a site opens a tab into itself - ChatGPT's "branch in new chat", an editor popping the open document out, a checkout returning to its own order page - that tab is the application at work, not a duplicate you opened, and automation leaves it alone. Same for a tab a page opens blank and fills a moment later (how sites survive the popup blocker): it gets 30 seconds of flight before any hygiene applies. Duplicates you open yourself, and links from other sites, are collapsed exactly as before.
Under the hood
- One service worker owns all logic; popup/options/archive are thin renderers.
- Serialized mutation queue: every state change runs FIFO - no storage races.
- Archive is written BEFORE tabs close: a crash mid-batch leaves an extra archive row, never a lost tab.
- URL identity: normalized (host case, default ports, trailing slash, sorted
query, tracking params like
utm_*/fbclidstripped,#/SPA routes kept) -?v=on YouTube stays significant. - A navigated tab is never the dedup victim: its back-history survives. On an address-bar/bookmark navigation the roles flip - the OTHER copy is merged into the tab you are in (archived first).
- Groups this extension creates are tracked by id in session storage and re-adopted after a restart by signature: site groups on 3-of-3 (title + color + member-domain majority), topic and rule groups on title + color. Rename or recolor a group and it is yours forever.
- Smart grouping validates model output against a strict JSON contract;
garbage falls back to domain grouping silently. The BYOK key lives only in
storage.local, is masked in diagnostics, and host access is requested at runtime for the one provider you chose - install-time site access is zero.
- Fresh-tab dedup acts before the page loads, ahead of navigation classification; the one theoretical miss is a target=_blank form POST to an URL you already have open - its origin page stays open, and two strikes retire the key anyway.
- A tab a site opens into itself is never auto-deduped (see the safety model), so opening a second copy of a page from that same site by hand is not collapsed either. Chrome reports both the same way - opener id, transition "link" - and no API tells them apart. The popup still counts it as a duplicate and "Sweep duplicates" still collects it.
- In-place merge triggers only on address-bar and bookmark navigations; link browsing never merges or reshuffles anything.
- The tabs API cannot see camera/microphone use - meeting sites are protected by an editable allowlist (meet/zoom/teams seeded) instead.
- Only websites are archived: a local or internal page cannot be recreated faithfully, so it is never archived and never gets an archive row - its duplicates are simply closed while the original stays open.
- macOS may hide notification buttons; the popup's "Undo last batch" is the canonical undo path.
- On-device AI needs Chrome 138+, ~22 GB free disk and 16 GB RAM or a 4 GB GPU; the model downloads once (~2-4 GB) and only after you click Enable.
- Smart group names come out in the dominant language of your tab titles.
- If TruePin's "move locked tabs to front" (
alwaysmode) is on, it may pull a locked tab out of a group; TrueTabs backs off after two strikes. - Maintained sort orders only groups TrueTabs made (groups you arranged yourself keep their places), and the "Other" catch-all keeps the end of the group block.
- Link browsing re-files a grouped tab only "at rest" (a couple of minutes settled on the foreign site, and never while you are on the tab); typed and bookmark navigations re-file immediately.
Chrome can save a group: a chip that survives closing the group and syncs across your devices. Extensions have no API for saved groups - TrueTabs cannot see whether a group is saved, cannot unsave one, and cannot delete a chip. Two platform facts multiply chips: groups live per window (each window has its own "Other", its own "GitHub"), and saved chips sync per device - save the same-named groups in three windows on two machines and the strip shows six chips.
What TrueTabs does about it: it never mints a second live group with the same name (a returning chip-restored copy of its own group is recognized by signature and reused), which removes the raw material for new duplicates.
What only you can do about the chips you already have: right-click each stale chip - Delete group; and if you do not want chips synced at all, turn off "Saved tab groups" under Chrome Sync settings. Simplest of all: do not use Save group on groups TrueTabs manages - it re-creates them from signatures after every restart anyway, so the chip adds nothing.
Your settings, "My groups" rules and protected-group locks live in
chrome.storage.sync: sign into the same Chrome profile elsewhere and they
are simply there. What never syncs, deliberately: the BYOK API key (a secret
stays on its machine), the archive (it can reach megabytes), and per-session
state. Options - Backup writes the portable rest to a plain JSON file
and reads it back - the key is included only behind an explicit toggle that
says, in plain text, what that means; importing a file that carries a key
asks once more. Web Store updates download in the background and apply at
the first quiet moment - no AI run in flight, none of the extension's pages
open; settings survive every version by construction (storage is untouched
on update, every read validates against the schema).
- Download/clone this repo.
chrome://extensions- enable Developer mode - Load unpacked - pick theextension/folder.
cd test
npm install
npm test # 79 e2e contracts against a real Chrome for Testing (ONLY="substring" to run one)
HEADFUL=1 npm test
node shots.mjs # regenerate the store screenshots
node shot-social.mjs # regenerate the social/hero images (light + dark)
./package.sh # build the store zip (strips the dev key)TruePin protects your pinned tabs. TrueTabs runs everything else. The names mirror the technical contract: TrueTabs never closes, moves, groups or archives a pinned tab - the two coexist by construction.
- TruePin - pinned tabs that cannot be lost.
TrueTabs is free forever, MIT-licensed, no accounts, no telemetry. If it saves your tabs (and your RAM), a star helps others find it. Donations - see the heart in the popup footer once the link is live; supporters land in SUPPORTERS.md.