WhyTab

Track your open tabs and surface forgotten ones before they pile up.

WhyTab — Stay Intentional About Your Browser Tabs You know the feeling. You open Chrome and there are 47 tabs staring back at you. Half of them you don't remember opening. A quarter of them you meant to read "later" and later never came. The rest are a mix of things you were researching, articles you bookmarked in your browser instead of a real bookmarker, and tabs you're afraid to close because what if you need them? WhyTab fixes this. Not by closing your tabs for you (unless you want it to). Not by grouping them into folders you'll never look at. But by making every tab mean something the moment you open it. ────────────────────────────────────────── WHY WHYTAB EXISTS ────────────────────────────────────────── Tabs are intentions that never got written down. When you open a new tab, you have a reason. Five minutes later, that reason is gone — buried under everything else your brain is juggling. An hour later, the tab is just noise. WhyTab captures that reason before it disappears. A small, unobtrusive bubble appears when you open a new tab and asks one question: "Why this tab?" You type a quick answer — "check flight prices", "read later for the essay", "look up that API endpoint" — and hit Save. Two seconds. Now that tab has meaning attached to it, and you'll see it every time you open the WhyTab popup. This tiny habit change has an outsized effect on how intentionally you browse. ────────────────────────────────────────── FEATURES ────────────────────────────────────────── ● INTENT CAPTURE When a new tab finishes loading, a minimal floating bubble slides in from the bottom right. It asks "Why this tab?" with a text input. Type your reason and press Enter or click Save — done. The bubble auto-dismisses after 10 seconds if you don't interact with it, and pauses the countdown the moment you focus the input so you're never rushed. The bubble is designed to be as low-friction as possible. It doesn't block the page, doesn't require a click to open, and disappears cleanly once you've answered. It can be dismissed immediately with the ✕ button or the Escape key. No popups, no notifications, no badges pestering you. Your intent is stored locally and displayed in the WhyTab popup as a small pill under the tab's title and URL. ● AI INTENT INFERENCE Sometimes you're in flow and dismissing the bubble is the right call. WhyTab accounts for this with AI-powered intent inference. If you don't answer the bubble, WhyTab sends the tab's title and URL to Groq's API and asks it to infer — in 8 words or fewer — why you likely opened the tab. The result is stored as an AI intent and displayed in the popup with a subtle "✦ ai" label so you always know it was inferred rather than entered by you. AI inference is powered by Groq's free tier (llama-3.1-8b-instant). It's fast, it's free, and it requires no credit card. You just need a Groq API key, which you can create in under a minute at console.groq.com. Paste it into WhyTab's settings page once and forget about it. AI intents are clearly distinguished from user-provided intents. If you later decide to add your own intent to a tab, your answer overwrites the AI inference immediately. User intent always takes priority. ● FORGOTTEN TAB DETECTION Tabs you haven't visited in 3 or more days are flagged as "forgotten" — highlighted in amber in the popup with a count displayed in the header badge. The Forgotten filter in the popup shows you only these tabs so you can review and close what you no longer need. This is the core loop that keeps your tab bar clean over time. Open the popup once a day or a few times a week, glance at the Forgotten count, and close what's stale. It takes less than a minute and prevents the slow accumulation of tab debt that makes browsers feel overwhelming. ● AUTO-CLOSE STALE TABS If you want a more hands-off approach, WhyTab can automatically close tabs you haven't visited after a configurable number of days. Enable it in Settings, set your threshold (default is 7 days), and the hourly background check will handle the rest. Pinned tabs are never auto-closed, no matter how old they are. Whichever tab is currently active in any window is also always spared. Auto-close is conservative by design — it only removes tabs that are genuinely stale and that you're not looking at right now. ● POPUP WITH FILTERS The WhyTab popup shows all your open tabs with their favicon, title, URL, intent pill, and how long ago you last visited them. Tabs are sorted with forgotten ones first, then by last visited time, so the ones that need your attention are always at the top. Three filters let you slice the list: — All: every open tab — Forgotten: only tabs not visited in 3+ days — Recent: only tabs visited within the last 3 days Click any tab in the list to switch to it immediately. The popup closes and focuses that tab's window. ● LOCAL-FIRST, NO TRACKING Everything WhyTab stores lives in chrome.storage.local on your device. Tab titles, URLs, intents, timestamps — none of it is transmitted anywhere except the tab title and URL sent to Groq when inferring intent (and only if you've configured a Groq API key). There are no analytics. No usage tracking. No account required. No data sold. WhyTab doesn't even know you exist. ────────────────────────────────────────── HOW IT WORKS ────────────────────────────────────────── WhyTab is a Manifest V3 Chrome extension built in vanilla JavaScript with no frameworks and no build step. The background service worker listens to Chrome's tab lifecycle events — onCreated, onUpdated, onActivated, and onRemoved — to track when each tab was opened, last visited, its title, URL, and favicon. This data is stored in chrome.storage.local keyed by tab ID. When a tab finishes loading, the service worker injects a content script (content.js + content.css) that renders the intent bubble. The bubble communicates back to the service worker via chrome.runtime.sendMessage when the user saves an intent. The service worker also kicks off the Groq API call in parallel — whichever finishes first wins, with user input always taking priority over AI inference. An alarm fires every 60 minutes to check for stale tabs (those not visited in 3+ days) and, if auto-close is enabled, remove tabs that exceed the configured threshold. The popup reads from chrome.storage.local, cross-references against live tab IDs to filter out any closed tabs the storage might still hold, and renders the list. Clicking a tab row calls chrome.tabs.update to switch to it. ────────────────────────────────────────── PERMISSIONS ────────────────────────────────────────── WhyTab requests only what it needs: — tabs: to read tab metadata (title, URL, favicon) and listen to lifecycle events — storage: to persist tab data, intents, and settings locally — alarms: to run the hourly stale tab check — scripting: to inject the intent bubble into pages — host_permissions (<all_urls>): required for the scripting injection to work on any tab you open No permissions are used for any purpose other than what's described above. ────────────────────────────────────────── SETUP ────────────────────────────────────────── Install WhyTab, pin the ⌬ icon to your toolbar, and start opening tabs. The intent bubble will appear automatically on every new tab. To enable AI inference: 1. Go to console.groq.com and create a free API key (takes about 60 seconds) 2. Click the WhyTab icon → Settings in the footer 3. Paste your key (starts with gsk_) and click Save That's it. WhyTab will now infer intent automatically for any tab where you don't answer the bubble. ────────────────────────────────────────── TIPS ────────────────────────────────────────── — Keep intents short. "Research competitor pricing" is better than a full sentence. The goal is a quick reminder, not a journal entry. — Use the Forgotten filter as a weekly tab audit. Everything in there is fair game to close. — Enable auto-close with a 14-day threshold if you want a completely hands-off approach. — Pinning a tab keeps it safe from auto-close indefinitely. — If the AI inference is off or producing weird results, check that your Groq key is valid in Settings. ────────────────────────────────────────── BUILT BY ────────────────────────────────────────── WhyTab is an independent side project. It's local-first, open source, and built for people who care about how they spend their attention.