Auto Close Inactive Tabs

Automatically closes inactive tabs based on customizable URL rules and time intervals

Auto Close Inactive Tabs closes the tabs you have stopped using, on a schedule you choose, and leaves the ones that matter alone. If you open tabs faster than you close them, this puts a quiet limit on the pile-up. You decide which sites get cleaned up and how long they are allowed to sit unused. Everything else is left exactly where it is. HOW IT WORKS You write rules. A rule has three parts: - A URL pattern that decides which sites it applies to - How long a tab may sit unused before it is closed - An on/off switch, so you can park a rule without deleting it Rules are checked from the top of the list down, and the first one that matches a tab wins. That single behaviour is what makes the list predictable: put your specific rules above your general ones and you always know which rule applied. You can drag rules into any order. A new install starts with one rule - "All Sites", 30 minutes - so the extension does something sensible before you configure anything. Nothing is closed until you switch the extension on yourself. TIME INTERVALS Preset intervals: 30 seconds, 1, 5, 15 and 30 minutes, 1, 2, 6, 12 and 24 hours. You can also type a custom interval such as 45s, 2m, 90m or 3h. The minimum is 30 seconds, because that is the shortest repeating check the browser's alarms API allows. Idle time is measured from when you last looked at the tab, not from when it was opened. A tab you keep returning to is never "old". "NEVER" - KEEPING THE SITES THAT MATTER Set a rule's interval to "Never" and matching tabs are never closed automatically. Because the first matching rule wins, a Never rule placed above your catch-all rule turns the whole thing into a whitelist: everything gets tidied up except the sites you named. For example - 1. Never close *://mail.google.com/* Never 2. Never close docs *://docs.google.com/* Never 3. All Sites * 30 minutes Your mail and documents stay open indefinitely; everything else goes after half an hour. There is no need for the old workaround of setting an absurdly long interval like 365 days. Tabs held open by a Never rule are labelled "Never closes" in the popup, so you can always see which rule is protecting what. NOTHING IMPORTANT DISAPPEARS Closing a tab someone still needed is the one mistake a tool like this must not make, so several layers of protection are on by default: - The tab you are looking at is never closed - Pinned tabs are excluded - Tabs playing audio are excluded, so music and calls survive - Tabs inside a tab group are excluded - Browser and extension pages are never touched - Any single tab can be protected for the rest of the session with one click The pinned, audio and tab-group exclusions each have their own switch, so you can turn any of them off if you would rather those tabs were treated like any other. You can also switch on a warning that appears about a minute before a tab is closed, with a "Keep open" button that protects the tab and a "Close now" button if you would rather not wait. Clicking the warning itself jumps to the tab, which resets its timer. UNDO Every tab the extension closes is recorded in a Recently Closed list in the popup, with a restore button next to each one. The list holds the last 20 tabs for the current browser session. There is also an optional notification after tabs are closed, with an Undo button that reopens the whole batch at once. URL PATTERNS Patterns use ordinary wildcards: * every site *://example.com/* one site, http and https https://example.com/* one site, https only *://*.example.com/* the subdomains of a site (mail., docs., www.) *://example.com/docs/* one section of a site If you prefer, tick "Regex" on a rule and write a regular expression instead. Patterns are matched against the whole URL. If you type something that could never match a full URL - a bare "example.com" with no scheme, or "https://example.com" with no path - it is treated as the whole site, and the options page tells you exactly how it was applied. A pattern written as "https://example.com/", which would match only that one page, is pointed out the same way. SHORTCUTS AND THE RIGHT-CLICK MENU Keyboard shortcuts, all customisable at chrome://extensions/shortcuts: Alt+Shift+A open the popup Alt+Shift+O turn auto-closing on or off Alt+Shift+P protect or unprotect the current tab Right-click any page for: Protect this tab Never close this site (adds a Never rule for that site, at the top of the list) Open settings THE POPUP The toolbar popup shows every open tab with the rule that applies to it and a live countdown to when it will close, sorted so the tabs closest to closing are easiest to find. Counts of active rules, tracked tabs and protected tabs sit along the top. From here you can protect a tab, restore a closed one, refresh the list, or jump to the settings page. APPEARANCE AND LANGUAGES Light, dark and system themes. The system option follows whatever your operating system is set to. The interface is available in 43 languages: Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. Right-to-left layouts are supported. BACKUP Export all your rules and settings to a JSON file, and import them again on another computer or after a reinstall. PRIVACY This extension does not collect, transmit or sell any data. There are no accounts, no analytics, no telemetry and no servers of its own. It requests no host permissions and injects no scripts into the pages you visit. Your rules and settings are saved in your browser's local storage. The list of protected tabs and the Recently Closed list are kept only for the current browser session and are discarded when you close the browser. PERMISSIONS AND WHY THEY ARE NEEDED - tabs: read each tab's URL and when it was last used, so rules can match and idle time can be measured, and close a tab when its rule is met - storage: save your rules and settings - alarms: run the periodic inactivity check - notifications: show the optional warning and undo messages, and confirm actions taken from the right-click menu or a keyboard shortcut - contextMenus: add the right-click menu items REQUIREMENTS Chrome 121 or later. That is the version where the last-used timestamp this extension relies on became available, which is what allows idle time to be measured accurately rather than estimated. WHAT'S NEW IN 1.2.1 - "Never" interval, for keeping chosen sites open permanently (whitelist mode) - Tabs inside tab groups are excluded by default - Keyboard shortcuts and a right-click menu - Optional warning before a tab closes, with a "Keep open" button - Recently Closed list and an optional notification with Undo - Light, dark and system themes - A short tour on first install - The popup and options pages are now translated into all 43 supported languages - Friendlier URL patterns: a bare domain now matches the whole site instead of nothing