Tab Auto-Archive

About

Tab Auto-Archive quietly closes the tabs you've stopped using and saves them to a searchable local archive — so you can finally stop hoarding 200 open tabs without losing a single URL.

How it works

Every hour, the extension checks which tabs you haven't activated in the last N days (default: 14, configurable from 1 to 365). Those tabs are closed and their URL, title, favicon, and archive date are written to a local archive. To get a tab back, open the archive page, search for it, and click to restore.

Features

• Automatic archiving — hourly background check, no nag, no popups
• Full archive page — search across titles and URLs, click an entry to restore, or delete
• Popup status — total tracked tabs, how many are within 2 days of being archived, click an approaching tab to jump straight to it
• Right-click → Archive selected — archive one or more highlighted tabs on demand, with an Undo button in the resulting notification
• Configurable threshold — 1 to 365 days
• Domain exclusion list — tabs from chosen domains are never auto-archived
• Pinned tabs are invisible — never tracked, never counted, never archived
• Safe defaults — never closes the last tab in a window, never touches chrome://, chrome-extension://, about:, edge://, brave:// URLs
• Dark mode — System, Light, or Dark
• Multiple languages — English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Hong Kong Chinese
• Export / Import — back up your archive to a JSON file and restore it on another browser
• Settings sync — your preferences follow you across signed-in Chromes (the archive itself stays local)

Privacy

Everything stays on your device. Tab URLs, titles, and last-active timestamps are stored in chrome.storage.local; settings are stored in chrome.storage.sync so they follow your Google account. No data is ever sent to any server. No analytics, no telemetry, no accounts, no network. The extension does not use any remote code — the entire JavaScript bundle ships inside the package.

Permissions

• tabs — read which tabs you have open and close inactive ones
• alarms — schedule the hourly archive check
• storage — save the archive and your settings
• unlimitedStorage — keep the archive growing without hitting the 5 MB cap
• contextMenus — add the right-click "Archive selected tabs" menu
• notifications — show the Undo notification after a manual archive
• scripting — inject a one-line alert into the active tab when a manual archive is skipped (e.g., pinned tab) to tell you why
• downloads — save your archive backup to a local JSON file

Source code: https://github.com/twolights/chrome-tab-auto-archive-plugin