Tabverse

Tabverse is an opinioned way of managing tabs inside Chrome browser, as an extension. Tabverse is a result after trying various tab manager extensions on Chrome extension marketplace: many of them are really good but none of them is ideal as I have imaged.

Development

pnpm install         # install (pnpm-lock.yaml is the source of truth)
pnpm run develop     # vite build --watch, development bundle (includes dev pages)

Load dist/ as an unpacked extension at chrome://extensions, then edit sources; the watch build refreshes the extension (reload the service worker from the extensions page after background changes).

The sync server's console is a second Vite project, at server/ui, built into the Go binary rather than into dist/:

pnpm run ui:dev      # the console at http://localhost:5174/, proxying /api to a server on :8223
pnpm run ui:build    # console -> server/internal/webui/dist (embedded, never committed)

pnpm run build        # production bundle -> dist/
pnpm run build-crx    # production bundle + dist_crx/tabverse.zip (store package)
pnpm test             # vitest + coverage
pnpm run typecheck    # tsc --noEmit
pnpm run lint:check   # biome lint
pnpm run format:check # biome format

Version bumps happen in one place: a pnpm version-style edit of package.json — the manifest version is injected at build time and tools/version_update keeps src/global.ts's UI version string in sync.

What is stored locally

Everything lives in IndexedDB in the browser profile: tabverses and their tabs, notes, todos, bookmarks, closed-tab history, and the tab previews - the thumbnails a tab card shows on hover.

The previews are the only part that is a cache rather than data. Each one is a picture of a live tab (~30-80 kB), it is keyed by a chrome tab id, and it is worth nothing once that tab is gone, so nothing in the product depends on one existing: losing the table costs a few missing thumbnails and nothing else. The service worker owns every delete of it, sweeping on a five-minute timer and the moment a tab is closed (adr/0016). Previews are never sent to a sync server, and they are the one table the schema upgrade is allowed to throw away.

The sync server lives in server/, the architecture and current status in ARCHITECTURE.md, and the design decisions in adr/.