Tab Sweeper

Notices when idle tabs pile up and asks before closing them. Nothing closes without your approval, and everything can be reopened.

Too many tabs? Tab Sweeper notices when idle tabs pile up and asks before closing them. Nothing ever closes without your approval, and everything it closes can be reopened with one click. HOW IT WORKS • Quiet under your limit — with 10 or fewer tabs open (configurable), Tab Sweeper does nothing at all. • Watching above it — past the limit, it tracks when each tab was last used. A tab untouched for 30 minutes (configurable) counts as idle, and the toolbar badge shows how many there are. • The ask — a small review window lists your idle tabs (favicon, title, domain, idle time), grouped into smart categories: News & reading, Docs & research, Social & video, Shopping, Work tools. Untick anything you want to keep, then "Close N tabs" — or "Keep all & snooze" to dismiss prompts for 2 hours. • The safety net — every closed tab lands on the "Swept tabs" page, grouped by day (last 500 kept). Reopen any single tab, or restore a whole day at once. • Full visibility — the toolbar popup shows every watched tab with a live countdown until it counts as idle, or the reason it's protected. You can always see exactly what the extension is thinking. NEVER TOUCHED The active tab in each window, pinned tabs, tabs playing audio, and any site on your whitelist are never suggested for closing. PER-SITE RULES Give sites their own idle timing. "news.ycombinator.com 15" flags Hacker News after 15 minutes; "docs.google.com 240" keeps your docs around for 4 hours. A bare domain means "never ask about this site" — you can also set that straight from the review window. POLITE BY DESIGN Prompts never appear more than once an hour, and never while Chrome is in the background. "Keep all & snooze" is respected for 2 hours. The defaults follow interruption research (it takes roughly 23 minutes to refocus after an interruption) and sit between Tab Wrangler's silent 20-minute close and Safari's ask-nothing 1-day auto-close. PRIVATE BY DESIGN No analytics, no account, no network requests — this extension never talks to any server. Tab titles and URLs are read only to show them to you, and everything is stored locally in your browser. The smart categories are computed on your machine with simple hostname and title matching: no AI, no data sent anywhere.