The internet is a maze. Sometimes in my travels through this maze, I circle back on a path I’ve already traveled. When that happens, my browser tabs start to look like this:
Some of those tabs are purely redundant. I discovered that Chrome used to include a Labs feature called “Focus existing tab to open” that attempted to avoid this, but it seems to have been removed.
You can now install my solution from the Chrome Web Store:
Upon opening a new tab or navigating to a new page, it closes any earlier, duplicate tabs in the same window. Before closing the tabs, a notification is displayed. Clicking the notification within a brief delay (~5 seconds) prevents the tabs from being closed.
There are a lot of tab-management extensions available for Chrome, but none accomplished exactly what I wanted:
- Close the duplicate tabs automatically and without interrupting the user
- Allow the default action to be canceled on a case-by-case basis
Since installing the extension, it’s closed dozens of tabs for me and helped preserve my sanity (and RAM). I hope you find it useful!