Vertical Tabs

A vertical tab bar with page previews in Chrome's side panel.

Chrome stacks tabs horizontally until the titles disappear. This puts them in a vertical list in the side panel instead, and gives every tab a picture of the page it is showing, so you recognise a tab by what is on it rather than by a favicon you have seen forty times. WHAT THE PREVIEW SHOWS IS YOUR CHOICE A preview is a photograph of the visible part of a page, and Chrome puts you back where you were when a page reloads — so a preview taken then can be a band of body text that identifies nothing. You pick what happens: • The top of the page (default) — the preview stays on the header, the part that makes a page recognisable at a glance. • What it showed when it loaded — frozen until you navigate again. • Wherever you are on the page — the preview follows you. MANAGING TABS, NOT JUST LISTING THEM • Search across titles and URLs — including tabs in your other windows, with one click to go there. • Group by site: file loose tabs into one tab group per host, with undo. • Lock a tab so nothing in the panel can close it by accident. • A command palette on Ctrl+Shift+P for everything the panel can do, by name. • Recently used tabs, in the order you were actually on them. • Find duplicates, hibernate tabs you have not touched in days, save a set of tabs to reopen later, copy the window out as a Markdown list, open a pasted list of links, and keep a note that survives a restart. • Drag to reorder, pin, group, or move a tab to another window. Full keyboard control. • One to five columns, adjustable card size, light and dark themes, English and Japanese. • Detach the list into a window of its own when you want it narrower than Chrome's side panel allows. BOOKMARKS IN THAT COLUMN INSTEAD, IF YOU WANT THEM The column beside the tab list holds those tools by default. Switch it to bookmarks and it becomes your own folders as a tree you open and close in place: click a row to open it, see a dot on anything already open in a tab, and press one button to bookmark the tab you are on. You can also tidy the tree: make a new folder, rename a bookmark or a folder (F2), put the rows of a folder in order by dragging them, from the right-click menu or with Alt+Up and Alt+Down, and move a row into another folder by dragging it there or with the menu's Move to…, which puts it at the end of that folder. Chrome asks for the bookmarks permission at that moment rather than at install, and you can refuse it or take it back later. The extension reads your bookmarks to draw the list and changes them only when you do one of those things — it never deletes anything. Switch back and your tools return exactly as you had them. IT DOES NOT TALK TO ANYTHING No servers, no analytics, no accounts, no network requests of any kind. Previews are stored on your own machine and never leave it. Bookmarks are no different: they are read out of Chrome, drawn on the screen, and never copied anywhere. An automated test asserts that every part of the extension makes zero network requests, so this stays true rather than quietly rotting. WHAT IT NEEDS, AND WHY Taking a picture of a page requires Chrome's permission to access that page — there is no narrower way to do it. After installing, open chrome://extensions, click Details, and set Site access to "On all sites", or no previews can be produced at all. The bookmarks column is the only part that asks for anything beyond that, and it asks the first time you switch to it, not at install. Say no and everything else works unchanged; say yes and you can still take it back from chrome://extensions, which puts the column back to asking. Requires Chrome 120 or later. The side panel's position (left or right) and its minimum width are Chrome's settings, not the extension's.