Orbiter

About

Orbiter — AI Tab Manager & Workspace Organizer                                                                                                                                            
                                                                                                                                                                                            
  Every power user knows the problem. You open Chrome in the morning with a plan, and by noon you have 40 tabs spread across three windows — half of them you've forgotten why you opened.  
  Research tabs mixed with work tickets mixed with that recipe you were going to try. Context switching is brutal. Finding anything takes longer than it should. And closing tabs feels like
   losing something you might need later.                                                                                                                                                   
                                                                                                                                                                                            
  Orbiter is built to fix exactly this. It's an AI-powered tab manager that organizes your browser into named, color-coded workspaces — and uses on-device AI to do most of the heavy
  lifting automatically.

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  WHAT IS A WORKSPACE?

  A workspace in Orbiter is a named collection of tabs with a purpose. "Research — Transformers." "Work Sprint." "Home Reno Planning." "Weekend Reading." Each workspace has a color label,
  a live tab list, an AI-generated summary, and a save/restore state so you can put it away and bring it back exactly as you left it.

  Think of workspaces like virtual desktops, but for browser tabs. Switch between contexts without losing anything. Save a workspace at the end of the day and restore it tomorrow morning.
  Your research tabs, your work tabs, your personal tabs — all separated and organized, never getting in each other's way.

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  ON-DEVICE AI CLUSTERING

  The most powerful feature in Orbiter is Auto Cluster. Hit the button once, and Orbiter's AI analyzes all your open tabs — their titles, URLs, and content signals — and automatically
  groups them into meaningful workspaces. It names them too. "Next.js Deployment," "Product Design Research," "Personal Finance," "Machine Learning Papers."

  This runs entirely on-device using Gemini Nano, Chrome's built-in AI model. No data is sent to any external server. No API keys. No account required. Your tabs stay private.

  Auto Cluster works progressively — it processes tabs in chunks and creates workspaces as it goes, so you see results appearing in real time even while it's still running. If you close
  the side panel mid-cluster, it keeps running in the background. Reopen the panel and the progress is right where you left it.

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  PER-WORKSPACE RE-CLUSTERING

  Already have workspaces set up and want to refresh which tabs belong in one? Each active workspace has a re-cluster button. Tap it and Orbiter uses AI to find the best matching open tabs
   for that specific workspace, reassigning them automatically. The spinner persists even if you close and reopen the panel — so long background AI jobs never lose their state.

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  AI WORKSPACE SUMMARIES (SNAPSHOTS)

  Tap the Snapshot button inside any workspace and Orbiter generates a concise summary of what that workspace is about — based on the actual content of the tabs inside it. The summary is
  stored with the workspace and shown every time you open it, so you always have instant context.

  "Comparing transformer architectures for NLP benchmarks. Attention mechanisms in BERT vs GPT variants, notes on inference latency."

  That's the kind of summary Orbiter produces. Useful for picking up where you left off after a long break, sharing context with a teammate, or just reminding yourself why that collection
  of tabs exists.

  Snapshots use Chrome's Summarizer API (Gemini Nano), running fully on-device. When the model isn't available yet, Orbiter gracefully falls back or hides AI features — the app remains
  fully usable for manual workspace management regardless of AI availability.

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  BACKGROUND CLUSTER DETECTION

  Orbiter's service worker runs a background cluster check periodically — by default every 30 minutes, but configurable to 15 minutes, 1 hour, or off entirely. It also triggers
  automatically when your tab landscape changes significantly (new tabs opened, tabs closed).

  When the background check finds a new meaningful cluster — a group of tabs that belong together but aren't yet in a workspace — it surfaces a suggestion banner inside the panel. The
  banner shows the proposed workspace name and tab count, and lets you save it as a new workspace in one tap or dismiss it. This makes Orbiter feel proactive without being intrusive.

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  SAVE & RESTORE WORKSPACES

  When you're done with a context, hit the bookmark icon on any active workspace to save it. Orbiter snapshots the full tab list — titles, URLs, favicons, last-accessed timestamps — and
  moves the workspace to your Saved section. The browser tabs themselves are freed up.

  Later, tap the restore icon to bring it back. Orbiter reopens every tab in the workspace and flips it back to active status. Your context is restored exactly as you left it. This is
  especially powerful for project-based work: one click to deep-focus, one click to put it away, one click to come back to it next week.

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  STALE TAB DETECTION

  Orbiter tracks when each tab was last accessed using Chrome's native lastAccessed API. Tabs that haven't been touched beyond your configured threshold (default: 24 hours, configurable to
   12h, 48h, or 7 days) are flagged as stale in the workspace detail view — dimmed visually with a red warning line separating them from your fresh tabs.

  The "Close Stale" button in the action bar closes all stale tabs in a workspace in one tap. This is a powerful cleanup tool for workspaces that have accumulated dead weight — tabs you
  opened for a reason but never got back to.

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  ADD & REMOVE TABS MANUALLY

  Full manual control sits alongside the AI features. In any workspace's detail view, tap "Add Tabs" to open a bottom-sheet picker listing all open tabs not already in this workspace. Tap
  any tab to add it instantly.

  To remove a tab from a workspace, hover any tab row — a remove button appears on the right. Tapping it unassigns the tab from the workspace without closing the browser tab. The tab stays
   open in Chrome; it's just no longer part of this workspace's collection.

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  SEARCH ACROSS EVERYTHING

  The search bar at the top of Orbiter searches across all workspaces simultaneously. Type a word and it filters the workspace list in real time — showing any workspace whose name matches,
   or any workspace that contains a tab matching your query.

  For tab matches, Orbiter shows the matching tabs inline below the workspace card — so you can see exactly which tabs matched and jump directly to them with a single click. Search works
  on both tab titles and URLs, making it easy to find that one article you remember opening three days ago without knowing which workspace it landed in.

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  ALL TABS VIEW

  The All Tabs screen gives you a live, sorted view of every open tab across all windows — grouped by window, sorted by most recently accessed. It has its own search filter. Tab rows show
  the site favicon letter, title, domain, and a one-click open button. It's the fastest way to find any open tab when you know roughly what you're looking for.

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  ACTIVITY HISTORY

  Every meaningful action in Orbiter is recorded in a searchable timeline. Workspace opens, saves, restores, deletions, tab additions, tab removals, AI snapshots, and AI re-clusters — all
  logged with a timestamp and workspace color indicator.

  History is grouped by day (Today, Yesterday, then dates) with clear event labels and icons. Search filters the timeline by workspace name, tab title, or URL.

  The most useful history feature: closed tab recovery. When a tab is removed from a workspace, its entry in the history timeline shows a reopen button on hover. Click it and the tab
  reopens in Chrome instantly. No more losing that tab you accidentally removed.

  History is kept for a rolling 7-day window, capped at 500 entries, stored locally in Chrome storage.

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  SETTINGS

  Orbiter's Settings screen puts all preferences in one place:

  Appearance — Toggle between light and dark mode. The theme is persisted across sessions and applies immediately across all views.

  Stale tab threshold — Choose how old a tab needs to be before it's considered stale: 12 hours, 24 hours (default), 48 hours, or 7 days. This setting affects both the stale tab highlight
  in workspace detail and the Close Stale action.

  Auto-cluster interval — Control how often the background AI cluster check runs: every 15 minutes, 30 minutes (default), 1 hour, or turn it off entirely. Changes take effect immediately,
  updating the Chrome alarm in the service worker.

  Export & Import — Download all your workspaces as a JSON file for backup. Upload a previously exported JSON file to restore workspaces. Useful for migrating between machines or just
  keeping an offline backup of your workspace setup.

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  LIGHT & DARK THEME

  Orbiter supports full light and dark themes with a single toggle in Settings. All colors use CSS variable tokens — surfaces, text, borders, accents — ensuring every view looks right in
  both modes. The theme is persisted in Chrome storage and applied on load, so Orbiter always opens in the mode you last set.

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  PRIVACY FIRST

  Orbiter is private by design:

  - All AI features run on-device using Chrome's built-in Gemini Nano — no data is sent anywhere
  - No account required, no sign-in, no tracking
  - All workspace data is stored in chrome.storage.local — it never leaves your browser
  - No external API calls, no telemetry, no analytics

  The only network activity Orbiter does is opening tabs you explicitly ask it to open.

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  TECHNICAL DETAILS

  Built with TypeScript, Vite, and Tailwind CSS as a Chrome Manifest V3 extension. Uses the Chrome Side Panel API for the management interface, the Tabs API (including lastAccessed from
  Chrome 121+), and Gemini Nano via Chrome's Prompt API and Summarizer API (Chrome 147+).

  AI features require Chrome 147+ with Gemini Nano available on the device. All other features (manual workspace management, save/restore, search, history, settings) work fully without AI.

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  Orbiter is for anyone who lives in their browser — researchers, engineers, designers, writers, product managers, students. If you regularly have more than 10 tabs open and wish your
  browser understood what you were working on, Orbiter is built for you.

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  Requires Chrome 137+ for core features. AI features require Chrome 147+ with Gemini Nano.