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Stack and organize your browser tabs like a kebab skewer.

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TabKebab is a Chrome side-panel extension that tames tab chaos. Group, stash, sleep, and restore tabs across windows — manually or with AI. Zero dependencies, zero telemetry, everything stays local unless you opt in.

Features

Tab Management

• Four views in the view bar, in this order: Tabs · Windows · Stash · Sessions (Focus Mode and Settings open from the header)
• Tabs sub-views: Domains, Groups (custom groups, Chrome tab groups, ungrouped tabs), and Duplicates
• Live tab list with favicon and title; click a row to switch to the tab, × to close it; sleeping (discarded) tabs are dimmed
• Row actions — every domain, Chrome group, and window row has Stash plus a ⋯ menu (sleep, keep awake, collapse/expand, ungroup, close…)
• Drag-and-drop tabs into custom groups
• Window health — status dot per window with color-coded thresholds (green / yellow / red)
• Hash-aware duplicate detection with a badge counter (refreshed every 60s while the panel is open) and bulk close with lossless undo from each tab's exact original URL
• Empty pages cleanup — find and close blank tabs (about:blank or missing URLs) while preserving Chrome's new-tab pages
• Safe AI domain commands — match only an exact host or its true subdomains, reject lookalike hosts, and revalidate live tabs before a confirmed close
• Stats strip — one line such as 3 windows · 21 tabs · 0 sleeping, hidden on Settings and Focus
• Toasts with Undo — stashing a domain, group, or window, deleting a stash or session, and closing duplicates all offer Undo

Tab Grouping

• Group by domain ▾ split button — one click groups tabs by domain into Chrome native tab groups; the ▾ menu has Smart group (AI) and Ungroup all… (with confirmation)
• AI smart grouping — understands context (research, shopping, work, entertainment) and creates meaningful groups; uses Chrome's on-device AI when no provider is set up and it is available, and falls back to Group by domain or Add an API key when it can't run
• Pinned tabs, popup/app windows, blank pages, and browser-internal pages are left alone by grouping
• 4-phase pipeline: Snapshot → Solver → Planner → Executor with live progress per phase
• Custom groups — create, rename, recolor, and manage your own groups with three ways to add tabs: drag-and-drop, text search filter, or URL paste
• Collapsible section headers in the Groups sub-view

Sessions

• Save full snapshots of every window, tab, and tab group layout
• Saved / Auto tabs — sessions view split into Saved (user-created) and Auto (automatic) sub-tabs for clean separation
• Recoverable restore outcomes — every saved tab is reported as restored, already open, invalid, or failed
• Restore modes: original windows (Restore) or the current window (Restore here)
• Audio-safe pipeline restore: batched creation → temporary background mute → discard → guaranteed unmute cleanup; non-discarding restores never mute
• Auto-save on browser start and at configurable intervals (default 24h), with retention policy (default 7 days, always keeping the 2 newest)
• Optional name — an empty name saves as e.g. "Session — Oct 8, 9:18 PM"
• Incognito tabs are never saved or sent to AI, and pages that cannot be reopened are left out
• Per-session export as JSON for sharing or backup
• Rename and delete sessions from the panel

Stash

• Stash and close tabs by window, Chrome group, domain, or all at once
• Stored locally in IndexedDB
• Never closes what it can't bring back — incognito tabs and pages restore cannot reopen (extension pages, about:, data:) stay open and are not stashed
• Fail-closed stash restore: incomplete restores retain the unchanged IndexedDB source even when delete-after-restore is enabled
• Two-phase progress bar: "Creating tabs..." then "Loading... X / Y ready" with animated stripe
• Restored badge on stashes already restored, with confirmation before re-restoring
• Favicon previews, source badges, tab count, and one-click restore or delete
• Per-stash export as JSON

Bookmarks

• Three bookmark formats: By Windows, By Groups, By Domains
• Multiple destinations: Chrome Bookmarks, Local Storage, Google Drive, or all
• Auto-bookmark on stash — automatically bookmark exactly the tabs that were stashed
• Bounded Chrome bookmark exports — at most 4 folder levels, a renamed or moved TabKebab folder is reused, the newest 30 date folders are kept, one export is capped at 5,000 bookmarks, and the day's snapshot is replaced rather than duplicated
• Compressed export — compact JSON to save space on Drive
• HTML bookmark page — browsable, searchable HTML uploaded to Google Drive with:
  • Tab navigation (Windows / Groups / Domains)
  • Clickable pills for quick-jump to any group
  • Live search with highlighted matches
  • Dark/light mode support
  • Responsive layout

Tab Sleep (Kebab)

• Discard tabs to free memory while keeping them in the tab strip
• Per-domain keep-awake exceptions — protect email, calendars, AI tools
• AI-assisted classification suggests which domains to protect
• Sleep by domain, group, window, or everything at once
• Auto-kebab idle tabs after configurable hours (default: 3 hours)

Focus Mode

• Time-bounded productivity sessions with live countdown timer
• 4 built-in profiles: Coding, Writing, Research, Meeting — each with preset allowed/blocked domains
• Profile-colored HUD — timer display glows in profile color (cyan, purple, green, blue), with matching light and dark theme colors
• Focus banner — a slim banner on every view shows the time left (or elapsed) with an End button, and stays in sync across panels in other windows
• Open-ended sessions — show elapsed time and a single End Session button
• Distraction blocking with three modes:
  • Strict Mode — only allowlisted entries are accessible; an empty list blocks every non-internal URL
  • Curated Categories — block Social, Video, Gaming, News, Shopping, Entertainment
  • AI Detection — AI categorizes unknown domains in real-time
• Complete allowlist policy — exact hosts/true subdomains, canonical exact URLs, and Chrome groups rebound by exact title on each run
• Tab actions on start — Kebab, Stash, Group, or monitor-only
• Session reports — stats on duration, distractions blocked, focus tabs
• Focus history — review your last 50 sessions
• Preferences saved per profile — your category selections and settings remembered
• Keyboard shortcut — press F to open Focus Mode

Natural Language Commands

• Command bar under the stats strip (press /), with a label showing the active provider
• Type commands like "close YouTube tabs", "find my GitHub tabs", "move my docs tabs to a new window"
• Supported actions: close, group, move to a new window, switch to a tab, and find
• Close confirmations are built from the actual matching tabs (count, windows, pinned, titles), not from AI-written text; over-broad filters are rejected, and group/move ask for confirmation across windows or above 20 tabs
• Works with any configured AI provider

Keyboard Shortcuts

• 1–4 — switch between Tabs, Windows, Stash, and Sessions (numbers follow the views that are switched on)
• ← / → — move between views when the view bar has focus
• F — open Focus Mode
• Ctrl+K / Cmd+K — search open tabs, stashes, and sessions
• / — focus the AI command bar, or open search when the command bar is not available
• ? — toggle the help dialog
• Esc — close search or help, leave Settings or Focus setup (back to Tabs), or leave an input
• Single-key shortcuts never fire while typing or together with Ctrl/Cmd/Alt, so Ctrl+F stays the browser's find

Google Drive Sync

• Profile-scoped — each Chrome profile gets its own folder
• Folder structure: TabKebab / {profile} / sessions, stashes, bookmarks, archive
• Manual or automatic sync at configurable intervals
• Fail-closed retention — only old, strictly dated recoverable copies are eligible; canonical, newest, young, malformed, undated, and unrelated files are protected, and the newest export of every individually exported stash is kept
• Recoverable cleanup — retention moves files to the Google Drive trash instead of permanently deleting them
• Bounded deletion records — sync deletion records expire after 180 days and are capped, so sync cannot break permanently
• Archive before overwrite — previous versions must be copied successfully before existing content is updated
• Cross-profile settings import from other profiles on the same Google account
• HTML bookmark export alongside JSON

AI Providers

• OpenAI — GPT-6 Luna (default), GPT-5.x, GPT-4.1
• Anthropic Claude — Haiku 5.5 (default), Sonnet, Opus
• Google Gemini — 3.8 Flash (default), 3.x Flash-Lite, 3.1 Pro preview (2.5 Flash/Pro listed for existing users only)
• Chrome Built-in AI — Gemini Nano, on-device, no API key needed
• Custom endpoint — any OpenAI-compatible API (Ollama, LM Studio, Groq, Together AI)
• Off by default — the AI provider select starts at Off; saved settings that name a retired model move to the provider default
• Per-family request shapes — reasoning models, thinking controls, and no unsupported sampling parameters
• Encrypted API key storage with AES-GCM 256-bit (PBKDF2, 600,000 iterations for new keys) and optional passphrase
• Response caching — LRU cache (200 entries, 24h expiry) to avoid redundant calls
• Request queue with concurrency control

Export & Import

• Portable v2 full backup of sessions, IndexedDB stashes, custom groups, keep-awake domains, bookmarks, effective settings, Focus preferences/history, and non-secret AI configuration
• Transactional import — validates before storage access, merges under one worker lock, and rolls back affected local/IndexedDB state on failure
• Import guards — an imported file can never enable AI or change the AI provider or endpoint (only per-provider model choices are taken), and a settings import can never weaken Drive retention
• Individual v2 exports for sessions, stashes, and settings
• Secret-free files — API keys, passphrase metadata, Drive/OAuth state, install IDs, active Focus state, and caches are excluded
• Bounded input — files over 25 MiB and malformed or wrong-kind documents reject before import
• Google Drive backup with subfolder organization
• JSON format throughout — human-readable, version-controllable

Settings

• Features — 11 on/off switches (Focus Mode, AI, AI command bar, Search, Windows view, Stash, Sessions, Duplicates, Automation, Bookmarks, Google Drive). All default on; a switched-off feature is hidden, its schedules stop, and its actions are refused, but its data is never deleted and recovery (restore, undo, export) always works
• Section index — a sticky row of chips jumps to General, Features, Sleep, AI, Automation, Bookmarks, and Drive
• Default view selection (Tabs, Windows, Stash, Sessions)
• Theme (System, Light, Dark)
• Tab count thresholds — configurable yellow/red warning levels (Tab Limits, collapsed by default)
• Automation — auto-save interval, retention, auto-kebab, auto-stash
• Bookmark configuration — formats, destinations, compression, HTML export
• Drive sync — connection, auto-export toggles, sync interval, retention
• Keep-awake domains — manage the protected domain list
• Backup & restore — Export Settings, Export all data, Import Settings

Tech Stack

• Manifest V3 with ES modules throughout
• Side panel UI — zero external dependencies
• IndexedDB for stash storage
• Chrome APIs: tabs, tabGroups, windows, bookmarks, storage, identity, alarms, sidePanel
• unlimitedStorage permission so large session and stash histories are not lost to the 10 MB chrome.storage.local quota
• Modular service worker — tabkebab-service-worker.js registers listeners and routes messages to core/background/*.js; console output is prefixed [TabKebab:<scope>]
• Google Drive REST v3 with OAuth2 (drive.file scope)
• 4-phase grouping engine: snapshot → solver → planner → executor
• Adaptive batched operations — lazy mode for 20+ tabs (5/batch with delay and per-batch discard)
• AES-GCM 256-bit encryption for API keys with PBKDF2 key derivation (600,000 iterations for new keys; older keys still decrypt)

Install

From source (Developer Mode)

1. Clone this repo:

   git clone https://github.com/michelabboud/tabkebab-chrome-ext.git
   

2. Open chrome://extensions and enable Developer Mode
3. Click Load unpacked and select the cloned folder
4. Click the TabKebab icon or pin it to open the side panel

Setting up Google Drive (optional)

See Google Drive Setup Guide for OAuth configuration.

Setting up AI features (optional)

1. Open Settings in the side panel (or click the AI status icon in the header)
2. In AI Features, pick a provider in AI provider (the first option, Off, means AI is disabled)
3. Enter your API key (if required), choose a model, and click Save Settings, then Test Connection
4. The AI command bar, Smart group, and other AI actions become available (AI must also be on in Settings → Features)

Development and verification

The extension remains dependency-free and Chrome loads this repository directly; there is no package install, bundler, or generated runtime output. Automated tests use Bun 1.4.2, pinned in .bun-version. Install that exact Bun version and verify it with bun --version before running the gate.

Run the same commands required by CI from the repository root:

bun test
bun test --coverage
bun test tests/syntax.test.js

The repository-owned Chrome mock resets local/session storage, listeners, tab/window/group state, runtime ports, failures, and call records between tests. It is intentionally an orchestration boundary, not a browser emulator: DOM, IndexedDB, extension lifecycle, OAuth, and Chrome Prompt API behavior still require the real-Chrome smoke matrix.

GitHub Actions runs all three commands, in that order, for pull requests, manual dispatches, and pushes to main. After they pass, a dependent Windows job runs package.cmd, verifies the version and exact archive root, and uploads one tabkebab-extension-<version> artifact. The packager includes only manifest.json, tabkebab-service-worker.js, core/, sidepanel/, and icons/; it is release packaging, not a runtime build. Tag pushes do not trigger this workflow.

Project Structure

TabKebab/
  manifest.json              # Extension manifest (MV3)
  bunfig.toml                # Bun test preload and coverage settings
  tabkebab-service-worker.js # Service worker entry: registers listeners, wires the router
  tests/                     # Bun regressions and Chrome API test doubles
  icons/                     # Logo and icon assets (SVG + PNG)
  core/
    background/              # Worker feature modules (one handler map each)
      router.js              # Message router + feature-switch gating (ACTION_FEATURES)
      tabs.js                # Tab/window actions, duplicates, keep-awake, kebab
      sessions.js            # Auto-save and session actions
      grouping.js            # Domain/smart grouping, manual + native groups
      stash.js               # Stash capture, restore, delete, undo
      bookmarks.js           # Bookmark snapshots, Chrome tree + HTML export
      drive.js               # Drive sync, exports, retention
      settings.js            # Settings, Drive settings import, portable files
      ai.js                  # AI actions, NL commands, Chrome AI panel port
      focus.js               # Focus readiness, ticks, navigation interception
      alarms.js              # Managed alarm schedule and dispatch
      lifecycle.js           # Browser startup, install/update, worker start
    log.js                   # Per-scope logger ([TabKebab:<scope>])
    tabs-api.js              # Chrome tabs/windows API wrapper
    sessions.js              # Session save/restore with v1→v2 migration
    stash-db.js              # IndexedDB stash storage
    grouping.js              # 4-phase grouping orchestrator
    duplicates.js            # Duplicate tab detection + empty pages
    focus.js                 # Focus Mode engine: state, timer, blocking
    focus-profiles.js        # Built-in focus profiles
    focus-blocklists.js      # Curated distraction blocklists
    focus-policy.js          # Pure Focus allowlist/blocking policy
    focus-ai.js              # Focus AI classification boundary
    tab-restore.js           # Shared session/stash restore coordinator
    nl-executor.js           # Natural language command execution
    settings.js              # Settings schema and CRUD
    storage.js               # Storage abstraction layer
    export-import.js         # Full data export/import
    export-schema.js         # Portable v2 schema and merge
    drive-client.js          # Google Drive REST API client
    drive-sync.js            # Drive sync schema, merge, tombstones
    drive-retention.js       # Fail-closed Drive retention policy
    ai/                      # AI provider abstraction
      ai-client.js           # Unified AI client
      provider.js            # Base provider class
      provider-openai.js     # OpenAI provider
      provider-claude.js     # Anthropic Claude provider
      provider-gemini.js     # Google Gemini provider
      provider-chrome.js     # Chrome Built-in AI provider
      provider-custom.js     # Custom endpoint provider
      crypto.js              # API key encryption
      cache.js               # Response LRU cache
      queue.js               # Request queue
      request-lifecycle.js   # Per-attempt timeout/abort lifecycle
      prompts.js             # AI prompt templates
    engine/                  # 4-phase grouping engine
      snapshot.js            # Phase 1: Capture tab state
      solver.js              # Phase 2: Domain-based solving
      solver-ai.js           # Phase 2 alt: AI-based solving
      planner.js             # Phase 3: Plan Chrome operations
      executor.js            # Phase 4: Execute tab moves/groups
      types.js               # Shared type definitions
  sidepanel/
    panel.html               # Main side panel UI
    panel.css                # Styles
    panel.js                 # View controller & navigation
    feature-flags.js         # Settings → Features switches on the panel side
    message-client.js        # Checked sendOrThrow() worker messaging
    components/
      tab-list.js            # Tab list + grouping controls
      window-list.js         # Windows view
      session-manager.js     # Sessions view
      stash-list.js          # Stash view
      group-editor.js        # Groups sub-view & editor
      duplicate-finder.js    # Duplicate detection UI + empty pages
      focus-panel.js         # Focus Mode UI: setup, timer, report, history
      command-bar.js         # AI command bar
      drive-sync.js          # Drive sync controls
      settings-manager.js    # Settings UI bindings
      global-search.js       # Ctrl+K search
      first-run-walkthrough.js # Getting-started guide
      ai-settings.js         # AI provider settings
      confirm-dialog.js      # Confirmation dialogs
      toast.js               # Toast notifications

Documentation

• Architecture
• Current progress
• Changelog
• Architecture decisions
• Reliability hardening design
• Reliability hardening implementation plan
• Reliability hardening SDD evidence archive

Credits

Created by Michel Abboud.

This project was built with the assistance of AI systems including Claude by Anthropic and Codex by OpenAI. In the spirit of full transparency: architecture decisions, code implementation, icon/logo design, documentation, and commit messages were produced through human-AI collaboration. Michel retains final review and approval.

License

See LICENSE for details.

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