A Chrome extension for people who keep a lot of tabs open. It groups, sorts, deduplicates and tidies tabs across every window, and it understands that a pull request, a ticket, a profile or a document is the same page even when the URL differs.
Vanilla JavaScript, no build step, no dependencies. Works in Chrome, Brave, Edge and other Chromium browsers (Chrome 121 or newer).
Chrome Web Store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/organize-tabs/ebnlpacdgjnofakgfgbildmjdhbibnpa
Every action is available from the toolbar popup, the right-click context menu, and (optionally) a keyboard shortcut. Sections and actions can be reordered and favorites pinned to the top; see "Make it yours" below. Actions that close tabs show a preview first, and the last close can always be undone.
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Group Tabs by Domain | Puts tabs from the same site into a tab group, in every window. Pinned tabs and existing groups are left alone. |
| Sort Tabs in Window | Sorts the current window by site and URL. Pinned tabs stay put, tab groups stay together and are sorted by name. |
| Ungroup Tabs in Window | Removes all tab groups in the current window. |
| Consolidate All Tabs | Moves every tab, pinned ones included, into the current window and sorts it. Tab groups come along, and a group joins an existing group with the same name. |
| Consolidate Unpinned Tabs | Same, but pinned tabs stay in their windows. |
| Split Windows by Domain | One window per site, plus one window for the sites with a single tab. Tab groups are kept. The old "Collate" action. |
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Deduplicate Tabs | Closes tabs that point at the same thing, using the duplicate rules below. Keeps the pinned, active, or most recently viewed copy. |
| Close Tabs Like This One | Closes tabs from the same domain, the same section of the site, or the same kind of page (all pull requests, all LinkedIn profiles). |
| Close Stale Tabs | Closes tabs you have not looked at for N days. Pinned, active and playing tabs are skipped. |
| Free Memory | Unloads stale tabs from memory without closing them. |
| Close Blank Tabs | Closes empty new-tab pages everywhere. |
| Park Window to Bookmarks | Saves the current window's tabs into a dated bookmark folder and closes them. |
| Restore Last Parked | Reopens the most recently parked folder as a tab group. |
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Pull Meetings & Media to a Window | Moves every tab that is playing audio or showing a meeting or video player into its own window and focuses the meeting. |
| Bring All Windows to Front | Focuses and cascades every window so misplaced ones reappear. |
| Undo Last Close | Reopens whatever the last action closed. |
Customize in the popup footer turns on layout editing: star an action to pin it to a Favorites tray at the top, and use the arrows to reorder actions within a section or the sections themselves. The default order is Windows, Clean up, Organize. The layout is part of your settings, so it syncs with the profile and travels with export and import, and the right-click menu follows the same order.
Two URLs are duplicates when they produce the same key. Without a rule, the key is the URL with the scheme, www., fragment, trailing slash, tracking parameters and query-parameter order normalized away. With a rule, many URLs collapse to one key:
{
"name": "GitHub pull request",
"match": "^https?://github\\.com/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/pull/(\\d+)",
"key": "github:$1/$2/pull/$3"
}That rule makes /pull/123, /pull/123/files, /pull/123/commits/abc and /pull/123#discussion_r1 the same tab. Built-in rules cover GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, Jira, Confluence, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google Docs and Drive, Notion, HubSpot, Slack, Figma, Amazon, Stack Overflow, Reddit and X. Add your own in Settings, where a tester shows which rule a URL hits.
The same rules power Close Tabs Like This One, so from any pull request you can close every open pull request with one click.
Auto-deduplicate (off by default) watches new tabs. When you open a link that is already open, the new tab is closed and the existing one focused.
Open Settings from the popup or from chrome://extensions.
- Preferences and rules are stored in
chrome.storage.sync, so they follow a signed-in Chrome or Brave profile across machines. - Export downloads a JSON file with everything. Import reads it back, on any profile.
- Remote rules file: point at a JSON file you host (a raw file in a dotfiles repo works well). Its rules are merged in after your local ones and refreshed on a schedule.
A remote rules file is either a full export or just {"rules": [...]}.
Defaults: Alt+Shift+O opens the popup, Alt+Shift+D deduplicates, Alt+Shift+S sorts the window, Alt+Shift+G groups by domain. Every other action can be bound at chrome://extensions/shortcuts.
Being on a call while tidying up is the common case, so a window holding a meeting or a playing tab is treated as primary: Consolidate and Split leave it alone (a setting, on by default). A tab counts as media when it is audible or on a meeting or player page: Google Meet, Zoom, Teams, Whereby, Around, Webex, Gather, Discord, Slack huddles, YouTube, YouTube Music, Twitch, Vimeo, Spotify, Netflix and Loom by default, editable in Settings. Pull Meetings & Media to a Window gathers all of them into one window, which is a good first click when a call starts.
No action ever moves a pinned tab out of its place, and no action breaks a tab group:
- Sort keeps groups contiguous and sorts them by name, with members sorted inside.
- Consolidate and Split move whole groups between windows. When the destination already has a group with the same name, the incoming tabs join it. Untitled groups keep their colour and members.
- Group by Domain adds tabs to an existing group with the matching name instead of creating a second one.
git clone git@github.com:hacktoolkit/organize-tabs-chrome-extension.git
cd organize-tabs-chrome-extension
make test # unit tests for the URL and rule logic (node --test)
make e2e # headless browser test of every action (needs Brave or Chromium)
make dev # open a throwaway browser profile with the extension and sample tabsCI runs both suites on every push and pull request (.github/workflows/ci.yml): unit tests on Node 22 and 24, and the e2e suite on Ubuntu with Chrome for Testing installed via @puppeteer/browsers. To use that same browser locally instead of Brave:
npx --yes @puppeteer/browsers install chrome@stable --path ~/.holodeck/browsers
BROWSER="<path printed above>" make e2emake dev launches the holodeck: Brave (or BROWSER=/path/to/chromium make dev) on a throwaway profile at ~/.holodeck/brave, named "🧪 holodeck" in the profile chip, with the extension loaded from this folder and two windows of sample tabs that exercise every rule. The profile persists between runs so settings, parked bookmarks and shortcuts survive; make dev-clean deletes it. make e2e uses a fresh profile under ~/.holodeck/tmp that is removed when the run ends. Nothing under ~/.holodeck is real, so humans and AI agents can trash it freely. After editing source, reload the extension at chrome://extensions.
To use it in your real profile: chrome://extensions, enable Developer mode, Load unpacked, pick the folder with manifest.json. Google Chrome's branded build no longer accepts --load-extension on the command line, which is why the scripts default to Brave; loading unpacked through the UI works in every browser.
Layout:
manifest.json
src/background.js service worker: message router, context menus, shortcuts, auto-dedupe, badge
src/lib/url.js pure URL logic: normalization, rules, duplicate detection, sorting (tested)
src/lib/settings.js storage.sync persistence, export/import, remote rules
src/lib/actions.js the action registry and everything that touches the tabs API
src/popup.* toolbar popup
src/options.* settings page
test/ node --test suites
All tab operations run in the service worker. The popup only sends messages, because Chrome closes the popup as soon as a new window is created or focused.
Organize Tabs does not collect, store remotely, or transmit any data. Tab URLs and titles are read and processed only inside your browser to find duplicates, sort and group. Preferences and rules are saved in your browser profile's own storage. The only network request the extension can make is to fetch a rules file at a URL you configure yourself, and that is off by default.
make package # organize_tabs-<version>.zipmake demo records promo/demo.mp4, promo/demo.gif and the stills in promo/stills/ by driving the extension in the holodeck and composing each frame with a live map of the browser's windows; it installs a static ffmpeg into ~/.holodeck/tools on first run. Launch posts are in promo/ANNOUNCEMENT.md.
STORE_LISTING.md has the store description, permission justifications and privacy answers to paste into the dashboard, and make screenshots regenerates the README images and the 1280x800 store screenshots in promo/store/ from the holodeck.
CI also attaches the zip to every run as the organize-tabs-zip artifact (Actions tab, pick a run, Artifacts). To try a build on another machine without cloning: download it, unzip, then chrome://extensions → Developer mode → Load unpacked → pick the unzipped folder.
See https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/publish.
Contributions are welcome, especially new duplicate rules with tests in test/url.test.js. Fork the repository and open a pull request.
Check out other Chrome extensions made by Hacktoolkit.
MIT. See LICENSE.md.
Logo: derived from the window-restore icon from Font Awesome (License: https://fontawesome.com/license).