InfiniTabs
Unlimited tabs. Zero clutter. Near-zero RAM.
A radically new way to browse—built for researchers, power users, and anyone who regularly “declares tab bankruptcy.”
InfiniTabs lets you open a theoretically infinite number of tabs and tab groups without slowing down your browser, all within a familliar interface: browse as usual, but with superpowers.
It achieves this by cleanly separating logical tabs from live tabs, storing them as native bookmarks, and presenting them through a persistent vertical sidebar tabstrip.
Active sessions manager (automatic real-time sync of tabs states) + bookmark manager and finder + vertical tabs navbar + autosuspender (into bookmarks!) = automagical infinite browsing!
Description - What is InfiniTabs
Modern browsers force all open tabs to remain fully loaded in RAM.
Power users routinely accumulate hundreds or thousands of tabs across many windows, leading to:
- RAM exhaustion
- cognitive overload
- duplicate tab groups
- constant tab bankruptcy cycles
- slow tabstrip navigation
- slow recovery after crashes
- difficulty re-finding previously opened research threads
Although tabs suspenders exist, they only delay but do not eliminate RAM exhaustion, are prone to losing tabs on crash recovery, have discoverability issues (hard to search for a past tab in-context of the session), switching issues (reloading a past session requires reopening all tabs, even if suspended, causing RAM exhaustion, even if just to find one tab).
InfiniTabs solves all of these problems at once by replacing the traditional model with a fully persistent, crash-proof, unlimited tabs architecture, that looks just like an usual vertical tabs bar.
Major Advantages of InfiniTabs
1. Infinite Tabs, Zero RAM Usage
You can open as many logical tabs as you want.
Only the ones you actively work on become live tabs.
2. Automagical familiar UI
Browse as usual with our vertical tabs bar, enjoy all the superpowers.
This is designed to provides the very same experience as a standard vertical tabs bar, all the magic happens automatically behind the scenes: open all the tabs you want, switch at any time to any other tab, close tabs, everything instantaneously. Most tabs you use will already be loaded, and you will only occasionally experience a slight delay, the time that the tab gets fetched if it was autosuspended.
3. Never Declare Tab Bankruptcy Again
Close all live tabs—your bookmarks/logical tabs remain perfectly intact.
4. Optimized for deep research workflows
InfiniTabs lets you:
- safely explore infinite rabbit holes
- without cluttering your working memory
- while preserving full retraceability even when closing the session at any time
- and keeping only a few active tasks visible
- Empowers neurodiversity (ADHD & Autism) workflows, allowing mixing depth search with breadth search and even immediate context switching and parallel multitasking with no slowdowns.
5. Instant Session Switching
Switching between past sessions:
- does not reload dozens or hundreds of tabs
- restores your entire workflow instantly
- mounts only the tabs you click but you keep the whole session context (neighboring tabs, tabs groups, window)
Switch back to a previous session in under one second.
6. Full Crash Recovery
Because everything is a bookmark:
- Crashes cannot destroy or lose any sessions, as they are saved way before a crash may happen
- Browser updates do not break the system
- You can extract all data even from a dead Chrome installation using external tools
- No periodic export needed, because all sessions changes are immediately synchronized on-disk
This is unmatched by any other session manager.
7. Unified Search, Archiving, and AI Tools
Since your sessions are simply bookmarks:
- External tools (past, present, future) can search, categorize, and archive them
- AI models can analyze your research corpus
- You are not locked into any proprietary format
8. Human Cognition-Friendly Model
InfiniTabs uses what we define as a decoupled split tabs model:
- Logical tab = reference to resource (also called "ghost tab")
- Live tab = temporary projection on the content (ie, the content is fetched in these tabs)
This leverages the cognitive limitations of the human brain to allow for a virtually infinite workspace illusion, while in reality only a very small subset of tabs are effectively loaded in-memory, just like how humans only work with a limited subset of less than 10 items at any time due to bounded working memory and attention.
9. Unobtrusive Design Philosophy*
InfiniTabs is designed around a philosophy of implicit management as much as possible to be as unobtrusive as possible:
- Always record states implicitly.
- Prefer “forgiveness via history (eg, undo)” to “ask permission now”.
- Do not ask the user for explicit decisions repetitively.
This philosophy is crucial both to keep the illusion of logical tabs being real tabs, and so that the gains in cognitive efficiency are not offset by unnecessary decisions. It should work just like how a browser navigation bar is supposed to, without offloading any of the technical challenges to the user.
An example is how past workspaces are recorded automatically so that the user can recover their previous global browsing state at any later point with just a few clicks without having to manage anything upfront, they only trigger the feature when needed, which happens much less frequently than if they had to manually create workspaces regularly anticipating future potential need.
Similarly, it is much easier and lighter cognitively to automatically create and name sessions, and allow the user to rename the session later, because it is much easier to determine how to name a session once its content is already filled compared to naming anticipatively before the session is even created. And here again, it is not a 1-on-1 mapping: session renaming aposteriori happens much less frequently because not all sessions are worthy of a permanent name, a lot of sessions are just temporary browsing sessions just to see an information or complete a temporally-bounded task, so that the session has anyway a finite (cognitive) life.
Installation
- Go to
chrome://extensions/
- Enable Developer mode
- Click Load unpacked
- Select the
src folder of this repository
Quickstart
- Open a new browser window.
- Pin the InfiniTabs icon.
- Click it to open the Side Panel.
- A session named
Session – Window <ID> appears automatically.
- Close all native tabs—notice they remain visible in the InfiniTabs sidebar.
- Click any item to mount it again as a live tab.
Note that on first launch, sessions are automatically created based on all open windows:
- All open tabs are captured
- Stored as the initial session for each window
- No risk of duplicate sessions, even if the extension is disabled and re-enabled later or after a crash, the sessions will be matched to the windows with no duplication.
For best usage, it is recommended to keep the native tabstrip horizontal, not vertical (although in practice there is no problem, but the experience was designed to work with two tabstrip: the virtual one being vertical, and the live "focus" tabstrip being horizontal).
Key Interactions
-
Create a Logical Tab : Open a tab → It instantly appears in the sidebar and is saved as a bookmark.
-
Mount (Restore) a Tab : Click a sidebar item → it opens as a live tab.
-
Unmount Tabs : Use “Unmount Others” to collapse the active set. This closes live tabs but preserves them all as logical tabs.
-
Switch Sessions : Use the session selector to jump between windows' sessions instantly.
Core Innovations and design choices
Logical Tabs vs Live Tabs
InfiniTabs introduces a new browsing model by reconceptualizing two different types of tabs:
Live Tabs
- Real browser tabs visible in the horizontal tabstrip
- Loaded in RAM
- Temporary view on the page's content
- Only a small subset of your workflow
- You can focus on just a handful of active tasks
- Perfect for ADHD/autistic workflows: a bounded working set
Logical Tabs
- Persistent objects stored as bookmarks
- Unloaded by default → no RAM footprint
- Displayed in the InfiniTabs vertical sidebar
- Mount (open) instantly when you click them
- Can represent tens of thousands of tabs safely
- Survive crashes, reinstalls, browser changes, and future migrations
This architecture allows the user to explore unlimited research threads without ever overwhelming RAM or cognition.
The insight is that we do not need to keep all tabs in RAM, because they are only viewports on the content, so they are only useful when a human look at them, and hence the efficiency of tabs loading is directly bounded by human cognitive abilities and browser architectures. Since humans can only process one page's content (or a couple max with split views or multiple windows) per sensory modality (visual, auditor) at once, it is unnecessary to load more than that. In practice, cognitive science repetitively shown that humans can only keep about 7 items in working memory, hence even if we assume that this is per sensory modality, this makes a bounded total of 14 tabs that need to be kept open at all times.
This is very similar to what is done in attention research for other modalities such as vision, it is well known that the human brain has a sparse representation of the visual fields, so that only the center of the view (fovea) is actually high resolution and fully colored, whereas the peripheral vision is highly compressed and in fact a mix of very low-resolution uncolored visual peripheral information which the brain postprocesses into a "super-resolution" by mixing with predictive memory (expected environment from past high-resolution information of this spatial location/viewpoint). This is starting to get implemented in consumer-grade VR headsets such as Valve's as of Novembre 2025. We apply here essentially the same principles of bounded human cognitive attention to drastically bound the computer RAM footprint of internet browsing without losing any navigation functionality, and in fact even gaining some as a side effect (eg, instant switching/resuming to past sessions).
NB: Of course there are circumstances where keeping more tabs loaded in RAM is preferable or necessary, such as autorefreshed tabs or tabs for (ticketing) queues, but this is an exception rather than the rule and can easily be managed as such by temporarily disabling auto suspending on these tabs.
One Window = One Session
Each browser window corresponds to one session which is itself composed of a set of logical tabs and a subset of live tabs, saved as one bookmark folder:
InfiniTabs Sessions
└── Session – Window 1234
├── Bookmark (Logical Tab 1)
├── Bookmark (Logical Tab 2)
├── Tab Group A (Folder)
│ ├── Bookmark A1
│ └── Bookmark A2
└── Tab Group B (Folder)
├── Bookmark B1
└── Bookmark B2
This means:
- Your workflow is segmented naturally
- Switching windows = switching sessions
- You can reopen any session instantly
- Logical tabs persist even if the window is closed
- Naturally possible to have multiple sessions/windows in parallel to do multitasking (eg, one window for documents writing, one for AI brainstorming, one for documents researching, one for listening to music, etc).
Workspace = set of windows/sessions open at once
Workspaces are sets of windows that were open at once, each mapped to a session.
Workspaces are both:
- automatically recorded constructs for later historical recovery from past workspaces history (eg, in case of OS reboot, browser crash, etc),
- and they can also be manually saved for common configurations that the user commonly use (eg, a workspace with a session for work tasks, another session for music, another session for team chat and documents, etc).
Workspaces were primarily created to overcome the problem that Chrome does not persist Windows IDs, they are epheremeral and change on browser restart, so that we need an alternative way to restore all opened windows/sessions after a crash or OS reboot (eg, regularly scheduled forced update).
As such, they are not meant to be the focus of this extension, because in any case, sessions work at the window level, even after a reboot, at worse this creates a new session, but the user can always switch back to a previous session manually at any point, or just start afresh with a new session. Workspaces are a convenience for users with multiple windows to switch back to multiple sessions at once with fewer clicks and cognitive load.
The concept of workspaces naturally lends itself to be another tool users can voluntarily use to organize their browsing experience, so offering a way to create favorite workspaces users often come back to is an easy way for users to reuse the same set of sessions, which cogitively corresponds to resuming a project or set of projects/executive plans.
Considered alternatives were to create a pinned tab that would point to our extension's page to store a window-persistent session ID, but this would have been brittle as it can be lost because of Chrome or extensions or user error, and is a much less polyvalent concept than workspaces. Another solution would have been to ask the user if they wanted to create or assign a window to a past session after a crash, but this would induce a big cognitive load as it would require user with multiple windows to find and then choose each session-window mapping for every windows. Because of our design philosophy, we decided against these permission-based approaches, and instead solve the problem at a higher conceptual level (across sessions) using a forgiveness-based approach (ie, undo session change, undo workspace change).
Why Bookmarks as the Storage Layer?
InfiniTabs deliberately uses native bookmarks as canonical storage because they are:
Crash-proof
Bookmarks persist even if:
- the browser crashes
- the extension corrupts
- Chrome updates to a new extension manifest (eg, many extension lost precious users' data when Google forcefully uninstalled MV2 extensions)
- Chrome suddenly activates new TOS and uninstall extensions not fitting them
- the profile fails to load
- the extension is uninstalled
- the browser gets corrupted and cannot be launched anymore (no way to access the extension anymore)
It is a standard in all browsers that bookmarks are preserved as much as possible, whereas extensions internal storage can be freely manipulated with no particular care by the browser, with terms changing at any time.
File-format stable and future-proof
Bookmarks are simple:
URL + title + position in the tree
No hidden metadata, no proprietary formats, no database lock-in.
Interoperable with the entire bookmarks ecosystem
Because sessions = bookmark folders, you immediately gain compatibility with:
- bookmark full-text search tools
- bookmark fuzzy search engines
- bookmark AI classifiers
- third-party archival/summarization tools
- cloud sync (Chrome/Google account)
- offline extraction tools in case Chrome becomes unusable
This also enable other browser's extension that work on bookmarks (such as bookmarks fuzzy search engine, full-text search engine, auto bookmarks AI grouping, etc) to instantly extend their functionality to work on live tabs and live sessions too (since they are stored as bookmarks all the time with our extension).
Hence, the extension is conceived with a high modularity in mind, ala Linux, where it fits into an ecosystem where the user has the freedom to expand functionalities with third-party tools and extensions that work on bookmarks.
Infinite scalability
Chrome supports enormous bookmark trees. InfiniTabs becomes a limitless storage engine for your browsing universe, since it is not bounded by RAM anymore but only by storage space (and bookmarks have a negligible storage footprint).
Vertical Sidebar Tabstrip
InfiniTabs replaces the traditional horizontal tabstrip with:
A vertical, scrollable, limitless tabstrip
- Stores logical tabs (bookmarks)
- Displays live tabs with a clear indicator
- Allows thousands of items to be browsed effortlessly
- Integrates tightly with tab groups
- Supports reorder, mount, unmount, and session switching
Implemented as a Side Panel for robustness
This ensures the sidebar always displays—even on:
chrome:// pages- Extension store pages
- Pages during loading
- Crash states
- Pages that temporarily disable extension scripts
Known Chrome limitation
Chrome’s Side Panel currently cannot:
- auto-collapse
- be resized below a certain width
- collapse to icons-only
But these trade-offs are worth the reliability and universal visibility.
Troubleshooting
- Background logs:
Chrome Extensions → Find InfiniTabs → “service worker” link → Console
- Sidebar logs:
Open Side Panel → Right-click → Inspect
- Bookmark integrity:
Check the
InfiniTabs Sessions folder in Bookmark Manager
Roadmap
Future releases will introduce:
- Automatic tab suspension into logical tabs
- Full-text search of session content
- AI grouping and semantic clustering
- Cross-session analytics
- Sorting, filtering, tagging
- Firefox port
- Edge and other Chromium-based browsers
FAQ
What is InfiniTabs, in one sentence?
It is a live session layer for browser tabs: your tabs are continuously tracked as logical tabs (bookmarks), while only the tabs you actively use are mounted as live tabs.
Is this just another session manager or OneTab-like dumper?
No. Snapshot tools save copies at points in time. InfiniTabs tracks sessions continuously in real time, so you resume live state instead of replacing snapshots.
Who is this for?
People who keep many tabs, switch contexts often, and want reliable recovery without manual save rituals.
Do I need to manually save sessions?
No. Session state is recorded automatically as you browse (open/move/close), so there is nothing special to trigger.
What changes in my daily workflow?
Very little: browse normally, and use the sidebar to mount/unmount tabs and switch sessions. The main difference is that old context is always resumable.
Can I resume only part of a past session?
Yes. You can reopen a subset and keep the full surrounding context visible in the sidebar, instead of losing context in a detached new window.
Will this reduce RAM usage?
Usually yes, especially with large tab sets, because logical tabs stay unloaded until clicked.
Does switching sessions reload everything?
No. Session switching is lazy: the full structure appears immediately, and content is loaded only for tabs you mount.
How many tabs/sessions can I keep?
Far more than traditional always-live tab workflows, because storage shifts from RAM pressure to bookmark/storage capacity.
What happens if Chrome crashes?
Your session structure remains recoverable because it is persisted as bookmarks continuously, not only at periodic snapshot times.
What if the extension breaks or is uninstalled?
Your data remains in native bookmarks, so you still keep the session tree and can inspect/extract it with standard bookmark tooling.
Is my data locked in a proprietary format?
No. Sessions are bookmark folders (URL, title, tree position), which are portable and interoperable.
Does this work with bookmark ecosystem tools?
Yes. Search, sync, archival, and AI bookmark tools can operate on InfiniTabs sessions because sessions are native bookmarks.
Does it support multiple windows/projects?
Yes. One window maps to one session, and workspaces can capture sets of windows for multi-project continuity.
Are there known tradeoffs?
Yes. Chrome Side Panel has UI limitations (for example sizing/collapse behavior), but the choice improves reliability and visibility across page types.
Should I keep some tabs always live?
For some workflows, yes (for example auto-refresh dashboards or queue pages). InfiniTabs supports focusing on selected live tabs while unloading the rest.
Author
Authored by Stephen Karl Larroque.
Conceptualized by the author.
Implementation by agentic coding under supervision (Google's Jules with Gemini 3 Pro + VSCode Kilo Code with Grok Code Fast 1).
License
Licensed under the MIT Public License.
Suggested complementary 3rd-party extensions/tools
Here is a non-exhaustive list of complementary opensource 3rd-party extensions or tools that work well with InfiniTabs:
- Bookmark Manager And Viewer: A very reactive and clear tree-like manager for bookmarks, can be used to find past bookmarks and in which past sessions they were. It is somehow extremely compatible with InfiniTabs, as it can keep focus on the same session's bookmark folder even after renaming via InfiniTabs, and changes in bookmarks content and positions are reflected instantly.
- Search Bookmarks, History and Tabs: Fast bookmarks fuzzy search engine
- Full text tabs forever (FTTF): Full-text search of historically visited pages (once you have the page title, you can find it in InfiniTabs)
- Floccus: Autosync bookmarks (and hence sessions if using InfiniTabs) between browsers (also works on mobile via native Floccus app on F-Droid or Mises or Cromite). By using both floccus and infinitabs on desktop, and floccus on mobile, this allows to sync sessions unidirectionally (you can also do bidirectional syncing by manually saving all mobile tabs as bookmarks - but as of january 2026 this will lose mobile tabs groups due to a limitation in Android Chromium).
- TidyMark: Reorganize/group bookmarks (supports cloud or offline ollama).
- Bookmarks Summarizer: Python app for full text search on content and AI-generated summaries (using cloud or offline ollama). (Untested alternatives: ArchiveBox, LinkWarden, other self-hosted bookmarks managers...).
- Wherewasi: Temporal and semantic tabs clustering into sessions using cloud Gemini AI.
- QuickTabs, to quickly switch to the most recently used (MRU) tabs (includes recently closed ones and bookmarks). Has lots of options, including 2 different fuzzy search implementations, or can choose regex. Can also enable auto switching to last tab on tab close (although infinitabs also does that).
