Tabee: renaming Chrome tabs with URL rules

A tab modifier is not a session manager

The distinction the project draws is the most useful thing in its documentation. Workspace and session managers such as Workona, Toby, OneTab and Tab Session Manager deal with sets of tabs: they save a group of open tabs and later restore them. Tabee deals with a single tab at a time. It looks at the URL of a tab when the tab opens or refreshes, and if that URL matches one of your rules it applies the actions attached to that rule. The result is a browser where the tab strip carries information instead of carrying ten copies of the same generic page title. The author describes the original motivation plainly: as a web developer with local, pre-production and production versions of the same site, he needed a quick visual cue for which environment a tab belonged to, and several tabs called the same thing were impossible to tell apart. The extension grew from that single need into renaming, custom favicons, automatic pinning, grouping, muting and closing protection, and the README states the design rule that followed: anything not expressible as a rule was left out on purpose.

Five match types, and only the first rule that fits wins

A rule has two halves: how to detect the tab, and what to do when it is detected. Detection comes in five forms, and the README lists them as contains, starts with, ends with, exact and regex. The URL fragment field holds the pattern, so a contains rule with localhost matches any URL that has that text somewhere in it, while a starts with rule needs the URL to begin with the fragment. Exact matching is the narrowest, and regex is the most capable and the easiest to get wrong, since the pattern is written by hand in the pattern syntax of the regular expression engine. The behaviour that matters most for rule authoring is the tie-break rule. The extension applies the actions of the first seen rule that matches the URL, so rules are evaluated in order and the first hit wins. That makes ordering the practical part of writing a rule set, since a broad contains rule placed near the top will shadow a specific regex rule below it. The README gives the reverse-move remedy in effect: it suggests a specific URL matcher for GitHub repository pages, which only pays off if no earlier rule has already claimed the tab.

What a single rule is allowed to do to a tab

The action set is what makes Tabee more than a renaming tool, and every action in the list is attached to a rule rather than configured globally. A rule can set a new title, and titles can be templates: {title} inserts the page title, $1 and $2 insert capture groups pulled from the URL by a regular expression, and a CSS selector in the form {.css-selector} pulls text out of the page itself. A rule can also replace the favicon, either with a built-in colored bullet, one of the Chrome icons, an emoji, an image loaded from a URL, or an image pasted in directly. Pinning a tab, assigning it to a named and colored Chrome tab group, and muting its audio are all per rule actions as well. Two of them are protective rather than cosmetic. One asks Chrome for a confirmation before the tab is closed or reloaded, and the other is called unique, which keeps a single tab per site by closing duplicates, so a rule for a mail host can be written to use starts with against https://mail.google.com with unique turned on. The README also notes that a tab can be renamed by hand at any time by right-clicking anywhere in the page and choosing Rename Tab, which is the escape hatch when a rule does not produce the title you wanted.

A rule set for environments, documentation and streaming video

The README works through several configurations, and they are worth reading as templates because each one shows a different action combined with a different detection style. The environment example is the one the author originally needed: a contains rule on localhost that renames the tab to [LOCAL] {title} and gives it a green bullet icon, a contains rule on a staging host that prefixes [STAGING] and uses an amber bullet, and a documentation rule that matches a path fragment and switches pinning on. A streaming rule matches youtube.com with contains and turns muting on, so a video starts silent the moment it opens. The GitHub example is the one that shows capture groups: a rule with a regular expression matcher on a repository URL and a title template of {title} | $2 by $1, where the expression captures the user name and the repository name, so the tab ends up showing the repository description and the owner in the title. The README shows the resulting title, reading as a description followed by the repository and owner. A second GitHub rule targets GitHub blob pages to display a file name in the title.

Installing Tabee in Chrome, Brave and Arc

There is no command to run here. The README states that Tabee is compatible with Chromium based browsers and points to the Chrome Web Store listing for installation, and the install table lists Google Chrome, Arc and Brave with the same store link, while Opera and Microsoft Edge are marked as available soon through their own add-on stores. Firefox and Safari are not available at all. That is the hard boundary of the project, and it is worth checking before anything else, because the extension relies on Chrome tab APIs and the Chrome tab group model. The usage steps are short: click the Tabee icon in the toolbar to open the popup, or right-click the extension entry and choose Options, then create your tab rules. If you want to work on the extension itself, the repository is a TypeScript and Vue project built with Vite, and the package scripts cover the local workflow.

  "scripts": {
    "test": "vitest --run",
    "dev": "rm -rf ./dist && vite",
    "build": "rm -rf ./dist && vite build",

The dev script starts Vite with the crxjs plugin from the development dependencies, and the build script produces the extension bundle, after which the build-zip script packages the dist directory into tabee.zip. Tests run under Vitest with a jsdom environment, and linting and formatting are handled by ESLint and Prettier over the src directory. The project pins a Node version through a .nvmrc file, and the package version in package.json matches the published extension version 1.1.8.

Tools that sit outside the rule system

The README is explicit that the rule engine is the core of the product, and a few features deliberately do not fit that shape. Tab Hive auto-closes inactive tabs and keeps them recoverable from a side panel. Spot Search opens a search for open tabs and bookmarks, bound to Alt+Shift+E on Windows and Linux and Cmd+Shift+E on macOS. A window merger folds every open window into one, bound to Alt+Shift+W. There is a lightweight mode for sites that are heavy to render, and the whole rule set can be imported and exported as JSON, which is how you move a configuration between machines or keep one in version control. The practical reading of that list is that Tabee is a tab modifier first, with a small utility belt attached. The author says as much in the core system section, arguing that a feature that cannot be expressed as a rule should be handled by a different extension, which is a narrow scope decision but also a coherent one: it keeps the rule language small enough to reason about, at the price of a few conveniences that a dedicated tool would do better.

Data stays in the browser, licence is MIT, releases are frequent

Two maintenance and trust points are easy to check. First, where the rules live. The README states that rules stay in the browser and that Tabee collects no data, which is a claim about behaviour rather than about a policy document, so the honest way to treat it is as the author's statement of what the extension does. Second, the licence. Tabee is MIT licensed, which is a permissive licence allowing use, modification, and redistribution, including inside a commercial product, provided the copyright and licence text are kept. The repository also carries a CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md, and the README states that pull requests are welcome, with commit messages expected to follow the Conventional Commits format, which is also documented in a file of its own. On the release side, the project is active: version 1.1.8 was released on 2026-10-17 and the last push was on 2026-10-18, with 1.1.7 released on 2026-10-14. The gap back to 1.1.6 on 2026-02-15 shows the pace is not constant, but the current activity is recent enough that a Chromium API change should be picked up rather than left stale.

Editorial conclusion

Tabee suits a developer or analyst who has many tabs from the same site and needs to tell a local build from staging from production at a glance, or who wants staging and production tabs pinned, grouped and muted by default. It does not suit a Firefox or Safari user, and it does not replace a session manager, since it changes what a tab looks like rather than saving and reopening sets of tabs. Before you install it, decide which behaviour you need, because the extension applies only the first rule that matches a URL, so overlapping rules mean the later ones never fire. Then start with the simple contains rules from the README examples and check the renamed title in Chrome, since a regular expression capture group that is wrong will silently produce a wrong label.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. furybee/chrome-tab-modifier on GitHub
2. License: MIT
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases