I built a Chrome extension to help with this — and I refuse to ship it the way everyone else does.
I open Chrome. There are 87 tabs.
I can't close any of them. Not one.
That Stack Overflow answer I'll definitely come back to. That Medium article was half-read at 2am. That GitHub issue someone tagged me on three weeks ago. That MDN page about the Intersection Observer API. The Anthropic cookbook example I bookmarked in my head, but not in my bookmarks. The Twitter thread about a font I might use in a future project. The Reddit post about ADHD productivity tools — especially that one.
87 tabs. Each of them is a "later" I made with myself, and now I can't break the contract.
If you're reading this and nervously nodding — welcome to the club. There are a lot more of us than you'd think.
This isn't laziness. It's measurable.
In 2021, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University did the first major study in 20 years on how people actually behave with browser tabs. The numbers:
- 55% of people can't close tabs they think they might need later. Not because they don't know how. Because closing feels like loss.
- 30% described themselves as "tab hoarders" without prompting.
- Only 19% said they keep tabs open out of laziness.
The rest of us — the majority — are doing something psychologically heavier. We've made the browser into our external memory, and we don't trust ourselves to remember things any other way. The researchers had a name for it: the black hole effect — once a tab is closed, it ceases to exist in our heads. So we keep it open. As insurance against ourselves.
The problem isn't that we hoard tabs. It's that the browser became our second brain by accident, and there's no good interface for managing a second brain made of 87 forgotten contexts.
What the market sells us
I've tried everything. I am not exaggerating — everything.
OneTab. Collapses your tabs into a flat list. Works for about a week. Then the list itself becomes a graveyard, just one without favicons. You don't open the list. The list grows. You install OneTab again on top of OneTab.
Workona. Builds workspaces. Genuinely well-designed. But it asks you to do meta-work — categorize, organize, maintain. That's another job on top of the job you were avoiding by keeping tabs open. And it's $8/month, forever, for a problem that shouldn't cost a subscription.
Tab Wrangler. Auto-closes tabs after N days of inactivity. The first time it silently kills a tab you actually needed — and it will — the trust is broken forever. You uninstall, you swear off this category of tools, you go back to 87 tabs. I've done this dance three times.
The Great Suspender. Was a beloved product. Then it was bought by an unknown party and turned into malware. Two million users got silently betrayed. The community is still scarred. People install tab managers now with one finger on the uninstall button.
What all of these have in common: they treat tab hoarding as the thing to fix. Auto-close more aggressively. Build heavier organization systems. Compress the chaos into smaller chaos.
None of them ask: What is the brain actually doing when it refuses to close a tab?
What it's actually doing
The brain is doing externalized memory, and it's terrified of forgetting.
Every open tab is a "do not forget about this." Closing it doesn't delete the information from the world — that information still exists on the original site. But closing it deletes it from your awareness, and your awareness is what your brain has decided counts.
This is why OneTab feels like a loss, even though nothing is technically lost. It's why auto-close breaks trust permanently — the brain learned "this tool removes things from my awareness without my permission." It's why workspaces are exhausting — you're being asked to actively manage a system that was working passively, just badly.
The fix isn't to be more aggressive about closing. The fix is to give the brain a trustworthy moment of conscious review — a regular point where it's allowed to look at its own forgetting and decide what's still important.
That's the entire idea behind Tab Hygiene.
What Tab Hygiene does
Once a week (configurable), it shows me a clean review of tabs I haven't actively used in a while. Grouped by topic. With each tab shown alongside how long it's been since I last touched it.
Then I decide. For each one: keep, snooze, or close. Nothing happens automatically. Nothing closes without my explicit OK.
That's it. That's the whole product.
It works because it separates two different brain tasks that other tab managers conflate:
- Holding things in awareness — that's what open tabs are for. Don't mess with that.
- Periodic conscious review — that's what Tab Hygiene is for. Adds a moment, doesn't replace anything.
When I look at 87 tabs, I see chaos and freeze. When I look at the 12 specific tabs I haven't touched in three weeks, the answers are obvious. "Oh — that Stack Overflow link, I solved that problem differently. Close." "That Medium article, I already moved on. Close." "That GitHub issue — actually, I do still need that. Snooze for two weeks."
The number drops from 87 to 47 in about two minutes of conscious work, once a week. And nothing was taken from me without permission.
And one thing I want to say about privacy
This is the part I've been waiting to write.
Every tab manager I've tried wants something from me. They want my account. They want my email. They want sync, which means they want my browsing history on their server. They want to "improve the product" by collecting "anonymous usage data," which is a phrase that means "we look at what you do."
I refuse to do this.
Tab Hygiene runs entirely in your browser. There is no backend. There are no servers I operate. Your tab activity, your closed-tab archive, your settings, your custom rules — all of it lives in chrome.storage.local, on your machine, and never leaves.
I don't have an account system because there's nothing to account for. I don't have analytics because I don't want to know what you do. I don't have telemetry because I don't need it to make the product work. The only optional network connection in the whole extension is to the payment processor — and only when you explicitly click "buy" or "start trial."
You don't have to trust me on this. You can verify it yourself. Open Chrome DevTools, go to the Network tab, and use the extension. You'll see zero outbound connections from Tab Hygiene to anywhere I control. Because I don't have anywhere I control.
The reason I'm making such a big deal about this: everyone in this category is selling something else. Workona is selling your workspace data on its cloud. The Great Suspender ended up selling your browsing history to whoever bought it. Free extensions in this category are almost universally monetized through "anonymous data partnerships" — translation: they read your tabs, you're the product.
I'm not. The price for using Tab Hygiene is $0 for the free tier and $19 once for Pro. That's the entire transaction. Nothing else is being moved.
Free vs Pro
Tab Hygiene is free forever. The weekly review, the topic grouping, the closed-tabs archive — all of it works without paying anything, ever. Most people will never need more than that.
For users who really get into the tool — who want to define their own automation rules, search across years of closed tabs, or do bulk operations — there's a Pro tier. One-time payment, 14-day free trial, no credit card to start.
Details on the site if you're curious. I'm not going to itemize features here — they don't matter until you've decided whether you want the basic product at all.
Where to get it
Tab Hygiene on the Chrome Web Store
For the full pitch, screenshots, and details: tabhygiene.com
Available in English, Spanish and German — both the landing page and the extension UI.
What I'd love from you
I'm an indie developer, and this is my first launch. Honest feedback is worth more to me than upvotes — what doesn't work, what's missing, what felt off. If you try it and it's not for you, I'd genuinely like to know why.
If you're a tab hoarder, you're not broken. The tools are.
I'm trying to build one that respects that.
P.S. I'm writing this with 47 tabs open. Tab Hygiene tells me 14 of them haven't been touched in over two weeks. I'm going to go deal with that. After this is published.
