← Juan Alvarado

Building my ideal tab manager

August 27, 2026

I’ve always been a tab hoarder, like full toblerone. But now that I can just sculpt code quickly, I was able to build my dream tab management extension. I call it The Pile. I’ve been enjoying using it, and the best description for it I have is this but for tabs:

Simone Giertz's Laundry Chair — a chair designed to hold a heap of worn-but-not-dirty clothes.

Simone Giertz’s Laundry Chair.

Here it is with six tabs open and the keep-warm limit set to three. The warm ones stay in the strip; everything past the horizon gets discarded and tucked into a collapsed “Pile” group.

The Pile new tab page: three warm tabs listed above a section labelled THE PILE containing three suspended tabs. The browser tab strip shows a collapsed group labelled Pile · 3.
Six in the pile, three warm, three suspended.

Open something new and it lands on top, which pushes the coldest thing down.

The same window after opening an MDN page. It sits at the top of the warm list, Simone Giertz has moved into THE PILE with a suspended badge, and the strip group now reads Pile · 4.
The new tab is on top and Simone Giertz has dropped into the pile.

Feel free to try the unpacked extension here:

jalvarado91/pile A New Tab page that treats your open tabs as an LRU 'pile' — recent on top, older browsable, cold tabs suspended to save memory. Chrome MV3.