GitHub Tab De-duper

One tab per pull request. No more duplicates.

A Chrome extension that stops GitHub tabs from piling up: opening a pull request, issue, or discussion you already have open focuses your existing tab instead of creating another one.

Built for workflows where GitHub links keep arriving from outside the browser — coding agents, terminals, Slack — and every click is another tab.

Features

• Automatic de-dupe — a new tab that duplicates an open PR, issue, or discussion closes itself, and you land on the tab you already had.
• De-dupe open tabs now — one button to clean up duplicates you've already accumulated. Keeps the best tab per thread (active, then most recently used) and closes the rest.
• Comment links still work — a link to a specific comment (#issuecomment-…, #discussion_r…) jumps straight to it in your existing tab.

Why a generic duplicate-tab blocker doesn't cut it

These are all the same pull request, and exact-URL matching treats them as five different pages:

github.com/owner/repo/pull/123
github.com/owner/repo/pull/123/files
github.com/owner/repo/pull/123#issuecomment-98765
github.com/owner/repo/pull/123/files#r456789
github.com/owner/repo/pull/123?notification_referrer_id=...

This extension canonicalizes GitHub URLs before comparing:

• Query strings and fragments are ignored for identity.
• A PR's Conversation, Files changed, Commits, and Checks views count as one tab (configurable).
• /issues/N and /pull/N match each other — they share one number space per repo, and GitHub redirects between them.

Only newly created tabs are deduplicated automatically. Navigating an existing tab you're already using never closes anything out from under you.

Install

Chrome Web Store — coming soon.

From source:

1. Clone this repo
2. Open chrome://extensions
3. Enable Developer mode (top right)
4. Load unpacked → select the repo directory

Settings

Everything lives in one panel — click the toolbar icon:

• Automatically de-dupe new tabs — the always-on behavior; on by default.
• Jump to linked comment — navigate the existing tab to the linked comment, or just focus it and stay put.
• One tab per pull request — treat PR sub-pages as one tab, or deduplicate each view separately.

Permissions

• storage — saves your settings (synced) and the saved-tabs counter.
• Host access to https://github.com/* — lets the extension see which GitHub tabs are open and their URLs. It cannot read tabs on any other site, injects no content scripts anywhere, and sends nothing over the network.

Development

No dependencies, no build step. Node 22+ for the dev scripts.

npm test           # unit tests for URL canonicalization and dedupe logic
npm run icons      # regenerate icons/*.png
npm run package    # build dist/github-tab-deduper.zip for the Web Store

Layout:

• background.js — service worker: watches tab creation, deduplicates.
• lib/github.js — pure URL canonicalization and dedupe logic (the tested core).
• panel/ — the popup panel, also used as the options page.
• scripts/ — icon generator and Web Store packager (pure Node).

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Built by Cline