OpenTabs

A new tab page that shows your actual open tabs — grouped by site and closable — above a calm briefing you choose: web apps, markets, weather, news topics, repos, calendar, to-dos.

Built on the OpenApps design system.

crates/tabs-core      pure Rust — parsing, ranking, grouping, dates. native + wasm
crates/tabs-feedgen   the daily feeds: two static files, no database
crates/tabs-market    the marketplace's ranking, moderation and privacy core
apps/extension        MV3 extension (Chrome + Firefox), vanilla TS
apps/marketplace      the pack marketplace, a static site
apps/market-api       the marketplace API: axum + SQLite, one binary
apps/site             opentabs.app itself
deploy/               nginx, Docker and the runbook — see deploy/DEPLOY.md
docs/config.schema.json  the published config schema

Where it runs

opentabs.app	the site, and the two daily feed files the extension reads
market.opentabs.app	the pack marketplace — site and API on one origin
auth.opentabs.app	OpenApps accounts, for the two things that need one

Signing in is optional and buys exactly two things: publishing a pack, and liking one. It is never used to store your configuration, which lives in your own browser profile and nowhere else.

deploy/DEPLOY.md is the runbook.

Three properties, in priority order

1. Light. The new tab opens 30–100× a day, so it must paint before you perceive it. Everything else is subordinate — including the interesting parts.
2. Highly customisable. Every group optional and reorderable, any topic you can name, and the whole configuration is one text document.
3. Powerful. Real cross-source dedupe and ranking, real calendar recurrence, real domain grouping. Not a link grid with a weather icon.

The architecture in one picture

chrome.alarms ─► service worker ─► fetch → tabs-core.wasm → rank
                                            │
                                   render-ready JSON
                                            │
                                            ▼
                                    chrome.storage.local
                                            │
              new tab opens ─────────────►  read once, paint. done.

All the work happens where nobody is waiting. The new tab page ships no wasm, makes no network request, and is 4 KB gzipped — asserted in apps/extension/test/budget.test.ts, so it stays that way.

Quick start

# Rust side
cargo test --workspace

# Extension
cd apps/extension
npm ci
npm run build            # → dist/  (load unpacked at chrome://extensions)
npm test                 # budget + manifest assertions against dist/
npm run e2e              # real Chrome
npm run build:firefox    # → dist-firefox/

npm run build needs the wasm-bindgen CLI pinned to the version in the root Cargo.toml:

cargo install wasm-bindgen-cli --version 0.2.126 --locked

Topics

There is no "AI news" feature and no "Finance news" feature. There is one topic engine, instantiated. A topic is a name plus source bindings, and a binding is either a fixed feed URL or a query against a searchable source:

Template	Yield
googlenews	~100 items for any topic, any locale
arxiv	papers — q-fin.TR is the HFT category
reddit / subreddit	no key, no OAuth — it is just Atom
bingnews	a second opinion
hn	practitioner signal

Seven topics ship as seeds (AI, Finance, Robotics, Crypto, Real Estate, Data Centre, Quantitative Finance). They are rows in a config file, not features — type "Semiconductor Supply Chain" into settings and you get exactly what they have.

Ranking is a scoring function, not a model: recency decay × source weight × cross-source corroboration. A story four outlets carry outranks one only a single blog ran, which is what turns a wide query source from noise into an asset.

Privacy

• Your tabs never leave the browser. No telemetry on tab data, ever.
• No account required, and nothing about you is stored on any server. Preferences live in chrome.storage.sync; calendar addresses and API keys never leave storage.local.
• Site access is asked for one site at a time, when you add it — the manifest requests no <all_urls>.
• Honest trade: because the extension fetches its own data, the sources you enable see your IP, the same way visiting them would. Nothing is proxied through us, and no central server learns what you read.

The backend

Two static files, written by a cron job:

cargo run -p tabs-feedgen -- --out /var/www/openapps/tabs/v1

apps.json (hand-edited — the release valve for new OpenApps products) and github-trending.json (one fetch of github.com/trending, 682 KB in, ~7 KB out). No database, no API key, no model, no auth. Sign-in, if ever added, needs one line: the extension origin in allowed_origins.

Licence

MIT.