Duplicate Tab Guard

Keeps one tab per exact URL. Local only, no network, no data collected.

Stop tab clutter without giving up control. Duplicate Tab Guard shows you the duplicate tabs you have open and lets you pick which ones to merge. Want it hands-off? Switch to Automatic mode and it keeps exactly one tab per web page: open a link you already have open, in any window, and you land on the tab you already had instead of getting a second copy. Tired of finding the same page open five times, in three windows, and not knowing which one has your scroll position? KEY FEATURES Manual mode (the default) Nothing closes by itself. Click the toolbar icon and see every set of identical tabs, with page titles and URLs. Untick any you want to keep and click Merge selected. The oldest tab of each set is kept. Automatic mode Set it and forget it. Open a page that is already open and the new tab closes while the original comes to the front, even if it is in another window. Navigate a tab to a page that is open elsewhere and the other copies close. Off switch Pause everything with one click. The badge shows OFF so you always know. Clean up on install The first time you install it, a welcome page lists the duplicates you already have open and asks whether to close them all at once, review them one by one, or leave them alone. Live count and stats The toolbar badge shows how many duplicate tabs are open right now: green for 1-2, yellow for 3-5, red for 6 or more. The popup shows the same number, plus how many duplicates were closed during this browser session. Safe by design Pinned tabs are never closed, and a pinned tab always wins as the one to keep. Browser pages (chrome://, new tab) are never touched. Matching is on the exact URL, query string and hash included, so two different searches or two different articles are never mixed up. Gmail and Google Docs are allowed to have multiple tabs. PRIVACY FIRST It runs entirely on your machine. The only permission is Chrome's tabs permission, used to read tab URLs in memory so duplicates can be spotted. No site access, no content scripts, no storage, no network requests, no analytics, no accounts, no ads. No data is collected or sent anywhere. The mode and the session count are kept by the browser only until you restart it. Free. No payment, no sign-in.