TabTV

Version 1.0. Source: https://github.com/keithadler/tabtv

MIT licensed. See LICENSE. How it works: ARCHITECTURE.md. Helping out: CONTRIBUTING.md.

A WebTV-style channel guide for your Chrome tabs. Press the shortcut and the whole window becomes a grid of big page screenshots. Drive the glowing cursor with the arrow keys, press Enter to switch, punch in a channel number to jump, type to find.

Install (unpacked)

1. Open chrome://extensions.
2. Turn on Developer mode (top right).
3. Click Load unpacked and pick this folder.
4. Optional: set the shortcut at chrome://extensions/shortcuts. Default is Cmd+Shift+Space on macOS, Ctrl+Shift+Space elsewhere. Clicking the toolbar icon works too.

Staying current when loaded unpacked

An unpacked install checks manifest.json on disk every 30 seconds. When the version number there is newer than the one running, the toolbar badge turns green and says NEW, the guide shows a bar with a RELOAD button, and by default the extension reloads itself the next time the guide is not open. Turn the automatic part off in Settings if you would rather press the button. A version that adds permissions still needs the reload arrow in chrome://extensions so you can approve them; the bar says which permission and does not auto-reload in that case. Store installs skip all of this.

Keys

Key	Action
Arrows	Move the cursor (left/right wrap, up/down pick the nearest card in the next row)
Enter or Space	Switch to that tab (Space types a space while you are searching)
Shift+Enter or Shift+click	Bring a tab from another window into this one and switch to it
Tab / Shift+Tab	Jump to the next / previous window section
Esc or Backspace	Go back to the tab you came from
Delete	Close the highlighted tab
Shift+Delete	Close every tab currently shown (press twice; useful after a search)
Shift+P or the PIP button	Pop that tab's video into a floating Picture-in-Picture window and go back to what you were doing
0-9	Channel number, like a TV remote. Pause and it jumps.
Letters	Find by title or URL. Esc clears.
?	Help card with every key and your actual shortcut
Home / End	First / last card
PageUp / PageDown	Jump a screenful up or down
+ / -	Bigger or smaller cards (remembered)
Cmd+Z or Ctrl+Z	Reopen the tab you just closed
Middle click	Close that tab

Cards in a Chrome tab group carry the group's color and name in the corner. Tabs open more than once show an orange ×2 badge so you can close the extras. Hover the domain line to see the full URL.

The ORDER button cycles tab-strip order, most-recently-used first, and grouped by site. Channel numbers always mean tab-strip position, so punching in a number works either way.

Click any other tab while the guide is open and the guide closes itself. The toolbar icon shows your tab count.

How pictures get taken

Chrome only lets an extension screenshot the tab you are looking at. TabTV grabs a frame each time a tab comes to the front or finishes loading, and refreshes the front tab every 30 seconds. Tabs you have not visited since installing show a NO PREVIEW snow screen with the site favicon; hover a picture to see when it was taken. Press SCAN in the top bar to visit every tab in the window once and fill them all in; it shows progress, and if some tabs are asleep it asks first because visiting them wakes them up (press S to skip those).

Pages Chrome refuses to capture (chrome://, the Web Store, some PDF viewers) keep the snow screen.

Thumbnails are stored locally in chrome.storage.local. Nothing leaves your machine. When a tab closes its picture is kept for seven days (at most 300 of them) so that undo, session restore, and a browser restart can match it back to the same URL. Private (incognito) tabs are never photographed.

Settings

Right-click the toolbar icon and choose Options, or open the extension's details page. You can list sites that must never be photographed (subdomains match), clear every stored picture, and jump to Chrome's shortcut page.

Search what was on screen is off by default. Turn it on and TabTV also notes the words visible on the page whenever it takes a picture, so typing in the guide finds a tab by what you saw there. Matching cards show a SEEN line with the words around the match. The text lives beside the picture on your computer, never leaves it, skips never-listed sites, and is wiped when you turn the switch off. Nothing is read from a page unless this is on.

Packaging

tools/pack.sh

writes dist/tabtv-<version>.zip, ready for the Chrome Web Store dashboard. STORE.md has the listing copy, permission justifications, and privacy text to paste into the dashboard, and node tools/store-shots.mjs regenerates the 1280×800 screenshots and promo tile in store/ from a real Chrome.

Demo mode

Open overview.html as a plain file or over a local server and it renders fake tabs, so the look can be tweaked without reloading the extension. Scan and tab switching are stubbed there.

Tests

tools/test.sh

Runs two headless suites against a real Google Chrome with a throwaway profile, loading the extension through the DevTools protocol (Chrome 126 or newer; the old --load-extension flag is ignored by current Chrome):

• tools/e2e.mjs covers the core loop: capture, the guide page, arrow keys, Enter, Escape, SCAN, group tags, badge, undo, auto-close, the never-list, picture expiry, and the options page.
• tools/e2e-scenarios.mjs covers the awkward cases: multiple windows, chrome:// pages, pinned and sleeping tabs, tabs opening and closing while the guide is up, find and channel keys, RECENT order, and a 43-tab window.

Both print PASS/FAIL per check and leave screenshots in a temp folder. Set DEBUG=1 to dump DevTools events on a failure. CHROME=/path/to/chrome overrides the binary.

Files

• manifest.json MV3 manifest
• background.js capture, storage, guide opener, scan
• overview.html / overview.css / overview.js the guide page
• tools/make_icons.py regenerates the icons with Pillow
• options.html / options.css / options.js the settings page
• tools/e2e.mjs, tools/e2e-scenarios.mjs, tools/e2e-devreload.mjs, tools/lib/harness.mjs headless tests
• tools/test.sh runs both suites
• tools/pack.sh zips a release
• tools/store-shots.mjs regenerates the Web Store screenshots in store/
• STORE.md Web Store listing kit
• LICENSE MIT
• ARCHITECTURE.md how the pieces fit, storage layout, message protocol
• CONTRIBUTING.md workflow, style, release steps
• CHANGELOG.md what changed when
• PRIVACY.md the privacy policy (host this URL for the store listing)
• SECURITY.md how to report a security problem
• .github/workflows/test.yml runs every suite on push

License

MIT. Copyright 2026 Keith Adler. Use it, fork it, ship it.