Arbalète

A sidebar for Chrome with Favorites, Spaces, pinned tabs, a command bar and Auto Archive, kept in Chrome's own tabs and bookmarks.

A sidebar for Chrome, inspired by the Arc browser's, that keeps your tabs in order: Favorites as tiles, Spaces, pinned tabs and a command bar, in Chrome's side panel, on Windows, Mac and Linux. No need to know Arc. On Windows and Linux there is nothing else to install. On a Mac, an optional free app also shows it at the window's left edge, as in Arc. What Chrome asks at install, and why • "Read your browsing history": Chrome's words for reading your open tabs' titles and addresses, to list them, and the short list of most visited sites its New Tab page shows, which Chrome draws from your history, for the command bar. The rest of your history stays off until you turn it on in Arbalète's settings. • "Read and change your bookmarks": your Favorites, Spaces and pinned tabs are Chrome bookmarks, made and moved from the sidebar. • "View and manage your tab groups": Chrome's tab groups, shown and changed in the sidebar. History, Google's search suggestions, downloads and site permissions are optional: each is asked for when you first use it, and can be turned off in Arbalète's settings. In the sidebar • Favorites as tiles: your everyday sites, one click away. Drag a tab to the top of the sidebar to make one. Closing one only puts its page to sleep: the Favorite stays. • Spaces, one per project or part of your life, each with its own pinned tabs, folders, icon and theme color. The first one, Personal, is a folder in your Chrome bookmarks' Other bookmarks. Go from one Space to the next with a click on their icons at the bottom of the sidebar, or a two-finger swipe on a trackpad. • Pinned tabs keep their address: browse away from it, then come back to the pinned page in one click. • Today: the tabs that are neither Favorites nor pinned, newest on top, with Chrome's tab groups. Drag to reorder. • Auto Archive: a tab in Today you have not looked at for 24 hours closes by itself and waits in Archived Tabs, one click to reopen it. Never archived: Favorites, pinned tabs, tabs in a group and tabs playing sound. A dot on the archive's button says when tabs went there. Choose 12 hours, 7 days, 30 days or never instead, in Arbalète Settings (the page it opens at install) or in the archive. • Theme colors with a color field, swatches, depth and grain, in light or dark; emoji and icons for each Space. • A library of your Spaces side by side, to rename, color, reorder them and move pinned tabs from one to another, with the downloads and the archive. • Chrome's downloads: search, filter by kind of file, open, show in their folder, pause, resume or cancel. • Site controls: whether the page is secure, Copy Link, and the site's camera, microphone, location, notifications, pop-ups and other permissions in one place. Command bar • Open a page, search the web with Chrome's default search engine, or go to an open tab, a bookmark, a folder or a page you visited. • Add the current tab to Favorites or pin it in a Space, by typing. • Keyboard shortcuts on Windows and Linux: Ctrl+Shift+S opens the sidebar, Alt+L opens its command bar for the current tab, at the top of the sidebar, and Alt+T for a new tab. On a Mac: Cmd+Shift+S, Ctrl+L and Ctrl+T (Cmd+L and Cmd+T with the app's keyboard shortcuts), and Ctrl+D pins a tab. Arbalète Settings shows yours; change them, or add others (to pin a tab on Windows and Linux, or go to the next tab or Space), in Chrome's page of extension shortcuts. Your data stays yours Arbalète is published by PopArchi, an independent developer in France. No account, no server, no analytics, no advertising. Arbalète shows nothing inside web pages and has no access to them; only the Mac app, if you turn on the switcher's previews, takes small pictures of Chrome's window, kept in memory. Everything you arrange is Chrome's own data: Favorites are Chrome's pinned tabs and a bookmarks folder; a Space's pinned tabs are bookmarks, and each Space a bookmarks folder. Remove Arbalète and they all stay. If you use Chrome Sync, Chrome syncs them like your other bookmarks. In private windows, only if you allow it in Chrome, Arbalète shows that window's tabs and keeps nothing. Arbalète for Mac: an optional companion app, free, for macOS 13 or later • The sidebar at the window's left edge, outside any web page: it slides in at the pointer, or stays pinned. • The command bar in the middle of Chrome's window, on Cmd+L and Cmd+T as in Arc, and a tab switcher on Ctrl+Tab. • Apple has not notarized it, so macOS asks you to allow it once per version. Only on a Mac, when you click Get the App (or I Have the App) in Arbalète Settings, Chrome asks to let Arbalète "Communicate with cooperating native applications"; on Windows and Linux it never does. Its keyboard shortcuts need macOS Accessibility, its page previews Screen Recording, both optional. Installed step by step from https://poparchi.github.io/arbalete/mac/