Description from extension meta
Vertical tab management from your side panel with support for tab groups, multiple windows, and much more.
Image from store
Description from store
Tab Shelf is a feature-packed, versatile, vertical tab manager for Chrome.
🤔 WHY VERTICAL TABS?
Whether you're frantically doing research for a paper, queuing up articles to read, or you just love hoarding tabs, tab management can be a pain. Having all your tabs squeezed at the top of your window makes it hard to remember what tabs you have and to quickly navigate between them.
Being able to persistently view all your tabs in a convenient, colorful, and customizable vertical view takes that headache away!
⭐️ FEATURES
- View and manage your tabs conveniently from the side panel.
- Use rules to automatically group tabs from specific websites (or right-click on a tab and choose to group all tabs from the same site).
- Save and restore tab groups and windows.
- Choose from amongst 20 colors to differentiate your tab groups and windows.
- Quickly search or filter your tabs by group, window, or whether they've got audio playing.
- Duplicate tab detection and deletion (optional).
- Sleep your tabs to save memory and energy.
- Sync your settings and grouping rules via your Google account across your other computers.
- Light and dark themes to match your browser, plus 20 accent colors to give your Tab Shelf some flair.
🌏 TRANSLATIONS
Tab Shelf is available in 17 languages.
🔐 PRIVACY POLICY
Please read Tab Shelf's privacy policy (which can be found at: https://www.tabshelf.com/privacy-policy) to understand how Tab Shelf prioritizes responsible permissions usage and user privacy. Tab Shelf does not and will never collect your data.
🛠️ USAGE
You can launch Tab Shelf in a number of ways:
1. Opening the Chrome side panel via the toolbar button (on the right-hand side, next to your profile button) and selecting Tab Shelf.
2. Pinning the Tab Shelf extension button to the toolbar. This allows you to open Tab Shelf in a single click.
You can also use the default keyboard shortcut to quickly open Tab Shelf:
* On Windows/Linux: Ctrl + Shift + O
* On macOS: Command + Shift + O
For a more detailed user guide, please visit:
https://tabshelf.com/user-guide
Disclaimer: This extension requires at least Chrome 114 in order for side panel integration to work. Other Chromium-based browsers are not officially supported.
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CHANGELOG - v2025.3.0
=======================
NEW FEATURES
- Session snapshotting and restoring now supported in the Saves menu.
- An optional snapshot button can be enabled in the Action Bar (a more convenient way to take a session snapshot instead of going to the Sessions section of the Saves menu and clicking on the Snapshot button).
- Added an option to automatically switch to a duplicate tab when closing its duplicates when filtering by duplicated tabs.
IMPROVEMENTS
- Reduced spacing in the UI. Tab groups will no longer have excess space around them. Padding and spacing within tabs in the default view have been reduced. Note that you can reduce this padding and spacing even further in compact mode.
- Redesigned "Move to..." menu with a simpler, less cluttered layout. Whole tab groups can now be easily moved between windows via this menu.
- Saves can now be sorted by alphabetical order or date added.
BUG FIXES
- Fixed memory leak issues with tab event handling. Memory and CPU usage should be improved.
- Fixed issue where duplicate tab detection isn't being triggered immediately.
- Fixed performance issues in duplicate tab detection engine.
- Fixed issue where saved tab groups were not restored with the correct tab group color.
- Fixed issue where picking a color for an existing tab group doesn't update the tab group color (the color picker also appeared to not register the selected color).
Latest reviews
- (2025-07-08) K D: It started crashing now everytime I try to use. Note I have >100 tabs per window and about 10 windows (not open at the same time). Whatever new features you have added is causing memory leak and instability.
- (2025-06-30) zeta Y: Excellent extension! I've tried lots of similar extensions but this one may be the most versatile one. --- 2025/6/30 update Usually crush when I try to send some tabs to other group.
- (2025-06-20) TheSlavScav: This made my browsing a ton easier. Exactly what I needed to sort through 200 tabs I usually have open during the day
- (2025-06-19) Junyue Cao: Best side panel
- (2025-06-11) Tim Bergman: A necessary part of my workflow! My only wish is to eliminate the top tab bar, as I never use it.
- (2025-06-09) Travis Wieser: The Tab Shelf extension is incredible. It's just a shame that Chrome doesn't allow you to hide the top tab bar.
- (2025-05-20) Károly László Orbán: 🤟🏻cool
- (2025-04-27) Andrew Alvarez: Far and away the greatest "vertical tab extension" there is, and probably one of the best extensions I've ever used. It has options to sleep inactive tabs, easy tab group manipulation, the option to save tab groups/windows as bookmarks, duplicate tab detection, a "scroll to active tab" button, plenty of customization options, options to group tabs automatically, and more. Better yet, many of these features have been added since I started using it, showing the amount of love it's getting from the developer. If I were to request anything else, it'd be for saved windows to also save tab groups into their own folders automatically, and for windows restored from saves to remember groupings. But these are just minor suggestions.
- (2025-04-22) bluelovers ka: good and support chrome tab groups
- (2025-03-06) bloodys spammers: 🙅👎🙅♀️👎🙅♂️ DOES NOT WORK IN YANDEX BROWSER! CLICKING EXTENSION ICON DOES NOTHING! PLEASE FIX! THANK YOU! 😊🌟😊🌟😊🌟😊🌟
- (2025-02-26) Lyman Wilson: For a tab hoarder like myself, this extension is amazing!
- (2025-01-06) fishxii: By far the best extension on google chrome (besides maybe adblockers).
- (2024-10-31) 白开: Useful
- (2024-10-19) Serge: It would be great if it were possible to detach this manager into a separate window—for example, with the ability to move it to another area of the screen or even place it on a different monitor. As it stands, it takes up too much valuable screen space.
- (2024-10-06) Kristopher Cole: Almost perfect tab manager for me. Only gripe is the sleep function, works perfectly and saves a lot of pc performance but a few features would be great. Such as an auto sleep function, where it will automatically sleep tabs that have not been used in a configurable amount of time. Also when closing window and reopening it doesnt remember my slept tabs so all tabs are active. If these were added i would give 5 stars.
- (2024-09-05) Greg BERTHELOT: A must have extension. It improve drastically my productivity as Digital Project manager and developper. It would be very nice if Pined tabs would not update the icon or if we can set a customized icon eg to keep pined tab with the app icon. Eg. with Notion the icon is updated with the icon page instead of keeping Notion icon which is a bit confusing. BTW a great improvement would be to add in pined part aliases to applications (Docker, Terminal…) which will make Chrome like MAC dock. Thanks for this great job ;-)
- (2024-08-27) L: Great tab manager, especially handy is that you can select multiple tabs from the sidebar to close, put to sleep, and many other options. Also works across different windows
- (2024-08-21) Hani Chaaban: So, so close to perfect. Please support easy creation of new tab groups - ideally, dragging and dropping a tab on top of another ungrouped tab would create a new tab group (similar to microsoft edge). Otherwise, a really well made extension!
- (2024-08-11) David Lewis: Trying out several vertical tab managers -- selecting this one, mainly because it has good functionality to open a lot of tabs and forget about the native horizontal tabs across the top (which becomes basically useless when I have a lot of open tabs). Pin, reload, mute and duplicate are particularly important. One fairly simple request to make it even better for that purpose -- an optional "compact" mode: pinned tabs are twice as close together (that is, reduce the white space between icons); eliminate the second line for each tab (the URL); eliminate or reduce the blank line between tabs. Or maybe make those three suboptions. Also, I don't quite understand how the "sleep" function works. Shouldn't a tab stay asleep until I explicitly unsleep it? But clicking the moon or the grayed sleep tab menu item does not unsleep. I have to click another tab. Thanks!
- (2024-08-01) Alvin Hunter: I like it. But one thing that could REALLY improve my workflow would be to allow it to popout of the window so I can put it where i would like to (IE, left side of the screen. Reason for this, is sometimes I'll have other "profiles" created and I can't quickly jump between windows. Another potential improvement is on how it handles popups. I run a softphone that has to be popped up. And once in a while, I click on a tab that unfortunately share the same domain name, it auto-filters to that tab. How I get out of it, is I have to go way up top and do a couple of clicks and it's fine. I'm not sure how to do go about fixing that, I guess, not really a programmer. But I do appreciate the add-on! It's made life a little bit easier.
- (2024-07-01) M9VK: Latest update required too many dangerous permissions. This is unacceptable without open source
- (2024-06-18) Katherine Elizabeth: Love this extension so much, since I'm much more of a fan of vertical tabs than horizontal ones. I do wish there was a way to expand and shrink tab groups though. Right now the tab shelf list only takes the state of the tab group in the vertical bar so you still have to expand or shrink it there. Not sure if that's a limitation of the sidebar API, though. Edit: New version let's you expand and shrink tab groups now so it's perfect :)
- (2024-05-28) Aftab Hussain: this is the best one I have seen so far and it has room to be even better
- (2024-05-28) John Charles Hallett: Truly superb, and it gets better all the time with frequent updates.
- (2024-05-17) Joel: Works really well, but I would really like a feature to hide tab groups that are not being used.
- (2024-05-11) Paul Blxck: It's perfect. Minimal yet feature-packed. It's everything I wanted really. Brilliant job.
- (2024-04-28) Söz Dünyası: good
- (2024-04-23) Hamza Patel: This is a brilliant extension. I've used in Brave for a while now and I love it. The only issue is that it does not seem to work in Opera. I am fairly certain this is a browser issue more than an extension issue as none of the vertical tab extensions work. I managed to get it to open by adding the URL (chrome-extension://gkiobnohamhihbaipacecjfljepjjlmg/index.html) to Opera's sidebar after enabling the "Custom user sites for browser sidebar" flag. The issue now is that favicons are broken. Favicons display as broken both in the side panel and when the URL is opened as a full tab.
- (2024-04-07) Yannick: This extension stands out as the best I've encountered.
- (2024-04-01) sep comp: very good, really good
- (2024-03-17) vkaec thryak: very good! Wish the grouping color was a four-sided border instead of the current two-sided border
- (2024-03-08) Adeel Elahi: please someone help me i've added the extension and enabled it but when i click on tab shelf icon nothing happens otherwise i like the concept of vertical tabs
- (2024-03-08) Марат Калимов: Dont work -_-
- (2024-02-11) StickNik: Really great extension, impressed by how many useful and thought out functions there are. Sleep specific or all other tabs, scroll to active tab, copy tab link with one click, show all tabs playing audio, muting specific tabs, all the filters you can sort tabs by, and the ability to multi-select tabs which most other vertical tabs extensions can't do. Very impressed and cannot yet imagine how it could be better!
- (2023-12-23) Ali Reza: chrome grouping is stupid and unpractical. can you make chrome groups in separate pans? something like Firefox Sidebery.
- (2023-12-14) ye zh: I think it is better to add a setting option and hide the 'ungroup' icon and 'close all tabs' icon of group since i would click them in mistake.
- (2023-11-22) Sossity C. Corby: Good app so far, it has saved me having to scroll and contantly adjust the width of my browser page to my computer monitor to see all my tab groups. Like another mentioned the one thing that will make it even better is to be able to save my tab groups to my google account or the cloud, and be able to open them up on more than one machine. For example, I have all my tab groups on my desktop, I would like to be able to open them up on my laptop, or tablet.
- (2023-10-26) Jondeir Junior: Great extension! Please make it compatible with the new tab group save and sync feature in chrome, so that we can close tab groups but they remain saved for later usage
- (2023-10-26) Jondeir Junior: Great extension! Please make it compatible with the new tab group save and sync feature in chrome, so that we can close tab groups but they remain saved for later usage
- (2023-10-08) Kc Profdev: This is absolutely genius. So many tab managers out there, this I think is the best in terms of attractiveness, simplicity & sheer usability. The only issue I've found is that it doesn't work with Vivaldi, but that's probably because this browser messes with Workspaces, Tab Groupings & the Side Bar in it's own way, which probably isn't compatible with Tab Shelf. Would be nice if this could be fixed though, as Vivaldi is my main browser... Oh, and more than a basic selection of colours are needed for more than 9 Tab Groups. But great work otherwise, an outstanding addition to Chrome.
- (2023-10-08) Kc Profdev: This is absolutely genius. So many tab managers out there, this I think is the best in terms of attractiveness, simplicity & sheer usability. The only issue I've found is that it doesn't work with Vivaldi, but that's probably because this browser messes with Workspaces, Tab Groupings & the Side Bar in it's own way, which probably isn't compatible with Tab Shelf. Would be nice if this could be fixed though, as Vivaldi is my main browser... Oh, and more than a basic selection of colours are needed for more than 9 Tab Groups. But great work otherwise, an outstanding addition to Chrome.
- (2023-09-30) harktu: great!
- (2023-09-30) harktu: great!
- (2023-08-31) Zeins Shiri: good,hoping to add a new function of shefting tabs in a group.
- (2023-08-31) Zeins Shiri: good,hoping to add a new function of shefting tabs in a group.
Statistics
Installs
6,000
history
Category
Rating
4.4 (55 votes)
Last update / version
2025-07-31 / 2025.3.0
Listing languages
en