Tab Debt: Make Room for What Matters

Description and use

Tab Debt is a Chrome extension that automatically removes inactive and duplicate tabs, preserves important URLs, and creates AI‑generated summaries as notes and a JSON ledger, saving up to 98 % of manual cleanup time.

Problem

Users keep many Chrome tabs open, causing resource consumption, screen clutter, cognitive overload, and distraction.

Outcome

Tab Debt reduces manual tab review time by roughly 95–98%, saves 58–79 minutes per 20 tabs, and removes duplicate/inactive tabs while preserving context via AI summaries and a JSON ledger.

Workflow

• User adds URLs to an "untouchable" list.
• Background service queries open Chrome tabs.
• Excludes active, protected, extension, and empty tabs.
• Groups remaining tabs by URL to find duplicates.
• Selects inactive or duplicate tabs for cleanup.
• Extracts visible page text and title.
• Sends data to Gemma 2 2B IT via Hugging Face Inference API.
• Receives concise one‑sentence summary.
• Stores summary and URL as a saved note.
• Closes the tab and downloads a JSON ledger of cleaned tabs.
• User can reopen a saved tab from the ledger or notes.

Evidence

Tab Debt is an AI-assisted Chrome extension that helps clean up inactive and duplicate browser tabs without forcing users to decide manually what to keep.

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The extension scans open tabs across Chrome windows.

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Before closing tabs, the extension generates a short AI summary for each one.

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The extension extracts a limited amount of visible page text.

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Gemma produces a concise one-sentence summary.

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The result is a browser full of unfinished decisions.

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