Chomp - Tab Monster

A little creature that lives in your browser and eats your stale tabs.

I had 140 tabs open when I started building Chomp. Not because I needed them. Because closing them felt like admitting something. Every tab was a small promise: I'll read this later, I'll come back to this, this might matter. Closing it meant the promise was broken. So I kept them all, and the browser got slower, and finding anything got harder, and the guilt got quieter but never went away. Here's the thing I learned: the tabs weren't the problem. The fear of losing something was. Chomp is a small orange creature that lives in your side panel. When your tab count crosses a line you set, he wakes up hungry. He picks the tab you haven't touched in the longest, peeks up from the bottom of it, and starts a countdown. You can rescue it ("not this one"), feed it to him straight away, or do nothing and let him eat. Every tab he eats goes into his Belly: the URL, the title, and a text excerpt of the page (the first 10,000 characters). It's searchable. It's local. Reopening one is a single click, and if you change your mind within 30 seconds there's an undo. After a while he shows you the number that ends the argument: how many tabs he's eaten, and how many you ever went back for. It's your number, counted on your machine, and nobody else sees it. Once you've seen it, you stop hoarding. Not because you're disciplined, but because you've stopped believing the tabs were worth anything.