Tab Wrangler: closing the tabs you stopped using, and giving them back

An extension that closes tabs and keeps the receipts

The project describes itself as a Chrome and Firefox extension that automatically closes tabs you haven't used in a while so you can focus on the tabs that matter. The homepage is tabwrangler.com, the licence is GPL-3.0, and the source is TypeScript.

The problem it solves is not deep, and that is a point in its favour. Browsers accumulate tabs, people stop noticing them, and the tab strip becomes a wall of things that are not what you are currently doing. The extension closes the stale ones on a timer, which is the same idea as a tab manager's auto-close, but with one important addition: nothing is thrown away.

The default rule is one hour of inactivity, configurable down to seconds in the options. The active tab and any pinned tabs are never closed, so the failure mode of an aggressive auto-closer, closing the tab you are reading, is designed out rather than apologised for.

The distribution is the two obvious places for a browser extension, the Chrome Web Store and the Firefox add-ons site, and the repository is the source for both. There is no account, no server and no telemetry described anywhere in the documentation, which for an extension that reads your tab list is a reasonable thing to check before installing.

The Corral is where closed tabs go, and how they come back

Every tab the extension closes is saved to the Tab Corral, a searchable and sortable list inside the extension. You can browse closed tabs by title or URL and restore any of them with a single click, and the header shows how many tabs Tab Wrangler has closed in total.

The restoration has two levels, and the difference matters. Clicking a row reopens that tab. A tab marked with a leaf icon restores with its full browsing history and scroll position intact, so the back button still works after you reopen it. The README notes the limit on that: it is limited to the most recent 25 closed tabs by the browser.

That limit is a browser constraint rather than a design decision by the extension, and it is worth understanding before you rely on the feature. The browser retains recent session history for closed tabs, and that is what makes a history-preserving restore possible at all. Tabs closed by the extension beyond that window can still be restored, but without their history.

The Corral also has a search box to filter by title or URL, a remove action for individual saved tabs, and a way to clear the entire list at once. The list is therefore a buffer you manage, not an archive, and the options tab lets you set the maximum number of closed tabs to keep.

Locks, auto-lock and the rules that keep tabs alive

The safety rules are the part of the feature list that decides whether the extension is pleasant or maddening, and there are several of them.

Tab Lock marks individual tabs as untouchable, and it can lock entire browser windows at once, in which case the lock covers current and future tabs in that window. Auto-Lock is the site-level version: add a website address or domain, such as `mail.google.com`, and tabs from that site are never closed. Locked tabs stay open no matter how long they have been inactive.

Two more protections are optional. You can keep tabs that are playing audio open, and you can keep tabs that belong to a tab group open. Both are settings rather than defaults, which is the right call, since the right answer differs by person.

Minimum open tabs sets a floor: Tab Wrangler will not close any tabs if you have fewer than this number open, and you can apply the minimum per window or across all windows combined. The right-click menu entry lets you send a tab to the Corral, lock it, or lock every tab from that domain, without opening the popup. And there is a single-click pause that stops all auto-closing until you resume it.

The pattern across all of these is the same: the default behaviour is aggressive enough to be useful, and every aggressive edge has an explicit override.

The countdown turns an invisible rule into a visible one

The Tab Lock view is where the extension makes its rules legible. It shows all of your currently open tabs and lets you control which ones Tab Wrangler is allowed to close, and each tab shows the time remaining before it will be closed. Once the timer reaches zero, Tab Wrangler closes the tab as soon as it can. Focusing a tab resets its timer, which is the mechanism that makes the whole thing workable: a tab you keep returning to never becomes stale.

Locked tabs behave differently in the display. Instead of a countdown, they show a reason, for example Locked, Pinned or Grouped, so at a glance you can tell why something survived.

There is also a minimum tabs indicator, a badge in each window header or at the top of the list showing how many tabs are open against your configured minimum. A yellow badge means Tab Wrangler is holding off on closing tabs because the minimum has not been reached. That is a small piece of UI doing real work, because without it the extension would appear to be ignoring its own rules.

The extension can also be paused from the popup header, which stops all countdowns and auto-closing until you resume it. Taken together, the countdown, the reason labels, the minimum badge and the pause control are what separate this from a timer script, because each of them answers the question a user would otherwise ask, which is why did it leave that one alone.

Settings sync through the browser, not through a server

The All Saved Settings section is where the privacy story and the configuration story meet. Tab Wrangler's settings are saved and synced by your browser, like Chrome sync for example, to all of your logged in browser sessions if you have sync enabled.

That is a design decision with consequences. There is no account and no backend, so there is nothing for a vendor to lose, hand over or be compelled to disclose, and the settings follow you between your own browsers through a mechanism you already control. The cost is that the extension inherits your browser's sync semantics, including the requirement that you are signed in and that sync is enabled.

The settings themselves are documented in a table with the possible values for each one. The first is the saved sort order for closed tabs:

| `corralTabSortOrder`  | `null`                    | `null, 'alpha', 'reverseAlpha', 'chrono', 'reverseChrono', 'domain', 'reverseDomain'` | Saved sort order for closed tabs. When `null`, defaults to `'reverseChrono'`      |

and the next controls whether the right-click context menu is created at all, with a default of `true`.

The rest of the options cover the behaviour in one place: stale time, minimum tabs, the Auto-Lock list, whether to protect audio tabs, whether to protect tab groups, the closed tabs storage with its maximum count and the choice of whether the list is cleared when you close the browser, how duplicate tabs are handled, an optional count badge on the extension icon, keyboard shortcuts for common actions, and import and export of both the saved tabs list and the settings.

Install from the Chrome Web Store or the Firefox add-ons site

There is no build step for a user. The README lists the two listings directly, Tab Wrangler for Chrome on the Chrome Web Store and Tab Wrangler for Firefox on the Mozilla add-ons site, and there is a project website at tabwrangler.com.

For contributors, the build tooling is in the repository and it is conventional. The package manifest is a TypeScript project with webpack doing the bundling, jest running the tests, and eslint and prettier for the code. The scripts are these:

  "scripts": {
    "clean": "rm -rf dist",
    "check-types": "tsc --noEmit",
    "build": "webpack-cli --config=webpack.production.config.js",
    "lint": "eslint .",
    "prestart": "npm run clean",
    "start": "webpack-cli --config=webpack.config.js --watch",
    "test": "jest"
  },

There are two webpack configurations, webpack.config.js and webpack.production.config.js, with the start target running in watch mode and the build target producing the production bundle. The jest setup has a jest.config.js and a jest.globalSetup.js, and the type check is a separate tsc pass with --noEmit rather than part of the test run.

The runtime dependencies explain a lot about the implementation. React 19 with react-bootstrap and bootstrap for the interface, @tanstack/react-query for data handling, react-virtualized for long lists, which is what you want when the Corral holds thousands of rows, timeago.js for the relative timestamps, async-lock for coordinating the tab and storage operations, color-hash to give each domain a stable colour, and file-saver for the backup export. There is a @types/chrome package, and the extension API types are therefore a first-class dependency rather than something declared by hand.

Version 9 with a rules feature, and a GPL licence

The recent releases show the project moving fast. v9.1.1 was tagged on 2026-10-13, and so was v9.0.0, whose release name is Tab Rules and Active Hours, with v8.5.3 a few days earlier on 2026-10-07. Two releases on the same day, one of them a major version, is what a feature release looks like when it is cut from a branch that has been accumulating work.

The repository is not archived and the last push was on 2026-10-13, so the branch and the newest tag are in step. The version in the package manifest is 9.1.1, and the licence field is GPL-3.0-only, matching the LICENSE.txt file at the root and the licence statement in the documentation.

GPL-3.0 is worth a moment of thought for an extension. It is a copyleft licence, so a fork must also be GPL-3.0, and it suits a project distributed from source with community contributions. It is a different posture from the permissive licences common in the extension world, and it is consistent with the presence of a CONTRIBUTING guide, a crowdin.yml file and a Crowdin badge for translations.

That last point is the one to check before contributing. The README has a Translation section under Contributing, and the presence of a Crowdin project means the localisation flow goes through that platform rather than through pull requests to source files.

Editorial conclusion

Tab Wrangler fits someone with more tabs than attention, who wants the browser to do the housekeeping and is reassured that a closed tab can come back with its back button working. It is the wrong choice if you want your tabs to persist across a browser restart without thinking about it, since the closed tabs list is a browser-limited store and the history restore is capped at the most recent 25 closed tabs. Verify first how you want audio tabs, grouped tabs and whole windows treated, because those are the settings that decide whether the extension is helpful or irritating in your own browsing.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. License: GPL-3.0
2. Project website
3. README
4. Releases
5. tabwrangler/tabwrangler on GitHub