Tabulary
User guide / v1.2.0 / Chrome · Edge · Brave · Firefox
The guide to everything Tabulary does.
Tabulary saves the tabs you are not finished with into boards and collections kept on your own machine. This guide covers every feature: what it does, where to find it, what it stores, and how to turn it off.
Written for version 1.2.0; check yours in Settings → About. New here? Install and first run and the popup and side panel cover most of what you need day to day.
01 — Getting started
Install and first run
Tabulary is a Manifest V3 extension for Chrome, Edge, Brave and Firefox (version 140 or later). It replaces your new tab page with your library and adds a button to the browser toolbar.
Installing
-
Install Tabulary from your browser’s extension store.
To load a build yourself in Chrome, Edge or Brave: open the browser’s extensions page (
chrome://extensions,edge://extensionsorbrave://extensions), turn on Developer mode, choose Load unpacked, and select thedistfolder. In Firefox, openabout:debugging→ This Firefox → Load Temporary Add-on, and pickmanifest.jsonin thedist-firefoxfolder. -
Tabulary opens its own tab the first time it is installed.
That page is your library, and every new tab opens on Tabulary from now on. If your browser asks whether to keep the new tab page an extension set, keep it.
-
Pin the toolbar button.
Browsers tuck new extension buttons into the Extensions menu (the puzzle piece). Open it and pin Tabulary. The button is how you save or find a tab without leaving the page you are on.
The getting-started checklist
The first time you open Tabulary, a short welcome explains boards, collections and tabs, then offers three ways in.
Quick setup
One page with the choices most people make, each already set to the usual answer. Every choice applies as you make it, and you can come back any time: it is the first tab in Settings, and Quick setup in the profile menu on Home.
The checklist has five steps. Each one ticks itself off when you actually do it — in the library, the popup, the side panel or an import — so you never have to report back.
Save your open tabs. Press Save open tabs, or drag a tab from the Open tabs list onto a collection.
Ticks off once your library holds a saved tab.
Reopen a saved tab. Click any saved tab. It stays in your library afterwards.
Ticks off when you open a saved tab.
Add a board for each project. Press + New in the sidebar.
Ticks off once you have two boards.
Find any tab in a second. Type in the search box at the top.
Ticks off when a search finds one of your saved tabs.
Use Tabulary from any page. Pin the toolbar button, then click it.
Ticks off when you open the popup or the side panel.
You never need an account. A local-only library is a first-class way to use Tabulary, not a trial mode — every feature except backup across devices works signed out.
Checklist progress is kept in this browser only. It is not synced, so a second computer starts its own checklist.
02 — The model
How a library is organised
There are three levels and only three. Every other feature — Home, the popup, sessions, rules, the review queue — is a different way of getting at these.
What Tabulary stores about a page
A saved tab is a reference, not an archive. Tabulary reads a tab’s title and URL at the moment you ask it to save that tab, and it keeps the favicon address so the row is recognisable. It does not read page contents, does not take snapshots, and does not watch pages you have not asked it to save.
↑ Contents03 — Surfaces
Where Tabulary appears
Four places, each doing a different job.
Your boards and collections, the tabs you have open, Sessions, Review and Live Collections. It is what a new tab shows unless you choose Home.
Shortcuts, a clock, one search box and your collections, on a background you pick. Open it from the top of the sidebar, or make it what a new tab shows. See Home.
The toolbar button opens a compact Tabulary: save this tab, search, and reopen things without leaving the page. See The popup and side panel.
Type tt, then a space, and the address bar searches your saved links. Results show the board and collection each one is in.
Inside the library
Both sidebars can open temporarily when you hover over them while collapsed, without shifting the page. Turn each side on independently in Settings → Personalize → Collapsed sidebar previews.
04 — The toolbar button
The popup and side panel
Click the Tabulary button in the browser toolbar, or press Alt + Shift + T. A compact Tabulary opens over the page you are on. It does most of what the library does, so you rarely have to leave the page.
Popup or side panel
The same app runs in two places. The popup drops down from the button and closes when you click away. The side panel stays docked beside the page while you browse; in Firefox it is called the sidebar.
A browser with no side panel for extensions always opens the popup, and the setting says so.
What is in it
Deleting or moving a tab from here shows an Undo for a few seconds.
↑ Contents05 — Capture
Saving tabs
Several routes in, chosen by what you have in front of you: one tab, one window, a few tabs from a list, or a link you type.
The tab you are on
Click the Tabulary button. This tab shows the page and where it will go: the collection you saved to last.
To save somewhere else, click the destination and pick a collection, or create one there.
-
Press Save. When the popup opens, the Save button already has focus, so Enter works too.
With Close tabs after saving on — the default — the button reads Save & close and the tab closes once it is saved.
Wherever you saved becomes the destination next time; nothing already saved moves. Saving the same address to the same collection twice does not make a second copy, and if the page is already saved somewhere else, the card says where. Browser pages such as Settings have no web address to reopen, so they cannot be saved.
Save for review — keep it now, decide later
Save for review stores the tab in a normal collection and marks it pending. It waits in Review until you file it or mark it done. See Review queue.
A whole window
In the popup, Save all tabs saves every tab in this window to the current destination. In the library, Save open tabs does the same with a choice of board and collection (or a new one), and its own Close these tabs after saving tick box.
A few tabs from a list
Add a link by hand
Every collection has an Add a tab action for a link you type in rather than one you have open.
Auto-sort
If you use Live Collections with file rules and switch on Auto-sort on save, the library’s Save open tabs offers an Auto-sort destination that routes each tab through your rules instead of into one fixed collection. Tabulary shows where every tab will land before it saves anything. See Live Collections.
Closing and reopening
Close tabs after saving is one setting, shared by the popup switch and Settings → Personalize → After saving. A tab closes only once the page it shows is safely in your library; a tab that could not be saved stays open. After tabs close, a message offers Reopen, which brings back exactly those tabs. (The popup closes along with the tab it saved, so use the side panel or the library if you want that button.)
Saving skips an address that is already in the destination collection. Two different pages from the same site — two emails, say — are two different addresses, and stay two saves.
06 — Organisation
Organising your library
Boards
Collections
Working with several collections at once
Press Select collections in the board toolbar to enter selection mode.
Select with the checkbox, or by clicking the unused area of a collection header. Selected collections are highlighted.
-
Move, copy, or delete the selection.
A move keeps collections and their contents together. A copy creates new collections and new tabs, so editing one afterwards does not change the other.
Press Done selecting to leave the mode.
Saved tabs
Tags
Tags are a single palette shared across the whole library, and they can be applied to both collections and individual saved tabs. Create, rename, recolour and delete them in Settings → Tags. Before a tag is deleted, Tabulary shows how many collections and tabs use it; deleting removes that assignment everywhere and strips the tag from any Live Collection rule that referenced it.
Layouts
| Level | Options | Set where |
|---|---|---|
| Collections on a board | Stack (a vertical list) or Shelf (a two-column flow) | Board toolbar, per board |
| Saved tabs in a collection | Cards, Rows, or Gallery | Board toolbar, per board |
| Defaults for new boards | Both of the above | Settings → Personalize → Library layout |
A board that has not chosen its own layout follows the defaults, so changing a default updates every board that never overrode it.
↑ Contents07 — Retrieval
Finding things again
tt, then a space, then your query. The suggestions come from your own saved links and never leave the device.Quick Access
Search in the popup, the side panel and the address bar is the Quick Access feature, on by default. Turning it off in Settings → Features hides the popup’s search box and stops tt suggestions. Inside that card, Open first decides where the popup puts you when it opens: on the Save button (the default) or in the search box.
08 — Home
A start page of your own
Home is a start page like your browser’s own, made yours: shortcuts to the sites you open most, a clock and greeting, one search box for the web and your saves, and your collections. Open it from the top of the left sidebar. Library, at the top of Home, takes you back. Your photo or initial in the top corner opens your profile: your name, where your library is kept, and Quick setup, your profile and Settings, plus signing in to back up.
Shortcuts
Add your most visited sites
Press Add your most visited sites. It appears on Home while you have no shortcuts, and always in Customize → Shortcuts.
-
Your browser asks whether Tabulary may read your most visited sites. Allow it to continue.
This is an optional permission, asked for only at this moment. Say no and nothing changes.
Tabulary adds up to eight of those sites that are not shortcuts yet. It keeps each one’s address and a short name, and nothing else from the list.
Customize
Press Customize at the top of Home. Changes apply as you make them.
For the theme, search engines and everything else, Theme, search engines and more settings at the bottom of Customize opens Settings.
What a new tab opens on
Choose in Settings → Personalize → A new tab shows, or in Customize → New tab page:
Shortcuts are part of your library: they travel with Google Drive backup, export and import. Home’s other choices sync with your settings when backup is on.
A background photo stays on the device where you chose it. It is never backed up, synced or exported, and your other devices show the theme instead.
Home replaces the Desk from version 1.1. When you updated, every shortcut on your desks was copied onto Home, in reading order, with duplicates removed. Other widgets did not carry over.
09 — Sessions
Named snapshots of browser work
A session is a deliberate, point-in-time snapshot. It is not a collection: a collection is a living place you keep links, while a session freezes what was open at one moment and never changes when you rearrange the library later.
Capturing
Press Save session in the library toolbar.
Choose the scope: This window, All windows, or an individually ticked subset of tabs.
Name it and confirm. The capture keeps each tab's order and which window it came from.
From any page, the Sessions section of the popup or side panel has Save this window: name it and save, without leaving the page. Nothing is closed.
Smart Restore
Nothing opens or closes until you confirm. Before restoring, Tabulary compares the session against what is already open and explains anything duplicate or invalid.
Managing
From the Sessions view you can rename a session, restore it, or delete it. The popup’s Sessions section does the same: Restore opens only the tabs that are not already open, and its ⋯ menu restores in a new window, restores everything, renames or deletes. Sessions are included in Google Drive backup, JSON export and import, and device migration.
Settings
In Settings → Features → Sessions: the master switch, the default capture scope, the default restore mode and destination, and Remember choices — off by default — which starts each dialog from your last confirmed options instead of the defaults. The Sessions view carries a compact copy of that switch. Turning Sessions off hides the sidebar entry, the save action and the popup’s Sessions section, but never deletes a snapshot.
↑ Contents10 — Review
A queue for tabs you have not decided about
Review is for a page worth keeping when you do not yet know where it belongs. A pending tab is a completely normal saved tab living in a real collection, with a small pending marker — it is never in limbo, and it is never at risk of disappearing.
Press Save for review in the popup or side panel instead of a plain save. If you have not chosen a review collection yet, it asks where review tabs should go.
Open Review from the sidebar. It can carry a count of how many tabs are waiting, or stay quiet — your choice.
-
Work through the queue.
File here moves the tab to the destination you chose at the top and clears its pending state. Keep in current collection clears the pending state and leaves the tab where it is. Delete removes it.
Turning Review off hides its actions and workspace; pending tabs and their state stay exactly as they are, and pending state travels in backup, export and migration as part of each normal saved tab.
↑ Contents11 — Live Collections
Rules that gather, without moving anything
A Live Collection is a rule, not a folder. Membership is recomputed every time the view is shown and never stored, so it cannot go stale — and deleting a rule deletes a rule, never a link. Off by default.
The two kinds of rule
Conditions
| Condition | Operators | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | is / ends with | "Ends with" matches subdomains, so github.com also catches gist.github.com. The default for new conditions is set in Settings. |
| URL | contains / regex | A malformed regular expression is handled rather than thrown. |
| Title | contains | Case sensitivity is a setting, off by default. |
| Tag | is | Deleting a tag strips it from every rule that used it. |
Combine conditions with any or all logic. A rule can be scoped to one board or scan every board, can include or exclude pending-review tabs, and can be sorted by most recent, title, or site.
Managing rules
The rules manager opens from the Live Collections view or from Settings → Features → Live Collections. Tabulary also mines domain → collection suggestions from your existing saves so a first rule is one click rather than a blank form.
Auto-sort
With Auto-sort on save enabled, saving offers an Auto-sort destination that runs each tab through your file rules. Preview before auto-filing a window shows exactly where a whole window's tabs will land before anything is saved. Both are separate switches, so you can have view rules without any automatic filing.
Sidebar
Optional live counts beside each view, and an option to hide views that currently match nothing. Turning Live Collections off hides every surface but keeps your rules. Rules are included in backup, export and device migration, with tag, board and target references written by name.
↑ Contents12 — Duplicates
Finding pages saved more than once
Find duplicates in the board toolbar groups saved tabs by a canonical form of their URL rather than by exact string equality.
www., letter case, a trailing slash, the fragment, and query-parameter order. Campaign parameters — utm_*, fbclid, gclid, si, ref and kin — are stripped.?v=, ?q= and ?id= routinely select a different page. A false match here would cost you a tab you agreed to delete.13 — Web search
Searching the web from the workspace
The search box at the top of the library and on Home sends a query to a search engine, or opens it directly if what you typed is a URL, a bare domain, or a local address. Ctrl/⌘ + K focuses it. As you type, it also lists matching saved tabs; see Finding things again.
Built-in engines
Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Brave, Perplexity, Wikipedia, GitHub, Ecosia, and Kagi.
Custom engines
Add your own with a %s where the query belongs — for example https://example.com/search?q=%s. A custom engine can carry its own short hint and icon.
Controls
All of these live in Settings → Personalize → Web Search.
↑ Contents14 — Appearance
Themes, layout defaults, and motion
Colour
Six palettes — Reading Room (warm paper), Slate (cool blue-grey), Sage (muted green), Ink (graphite neutral), Rosewood (dusty rose), and Marine (deep teal and navy). The background atmosphere and the main action colour are chosen separately, so you can pair any background with any accent; new installs start on the calm Ink-and-Rust combination this website wears. Colour mode is light, dark, or follow the device.
Other Personalize controls
Motion
Settings → Motion holds every animation preference in one place.
Your system’s reduce-motion setting always takes priority: with it on, Tabulary does not animate, whatever these settings say.
15 — Data
Account, backup and sync
Tabulary is local-first. Everything you save goes into IndexedDB in your own browser and works fully offline. An account is only ever about identity and backup.
Signing in
Backup to your own Drive
Backup writes to appDataFolder, a hidden folder in your own Google Drive that belongs to the extension. It is not a shared Tabulary database. The permission requested is drive.appdata, which cannot see your files, photos or documents, and you can revoke it or delete that folder at any time.
Backup covers boards, collections, tabs, tags, sessions, Live Collection rules, Home shortcuts, your settings (including how Home looks) and profile data, with pull/push status and a manual Sync now. A photo behind Home is the exception: it stays on the device where you chose it.
The extension stores only a short-lived Drive access token. Google refresh tokens and the OAuth client secret never ship inside the extension — they live in a separately deployed token broker that never receives your boards, collections, tabs, or browsing data. It only returns a short-lived access token when a sync needs one.
Separate data spaces
Local-only data and each signed-in account use separate local databases, so one identity's tabs can never appear in another's. Nothing moves between them on its own.
The full detail of every permission and why it is requested is in the privacy policy.
↑ Contents16 — Portability
Import and export
Every import route is read, then preview, then commit. Nothing touches your library until you confirm a specific selection.
Importing
.json), with its sessions and Home shortcuts..json). Anything unreadable is counted and reported rather than silently dropped.url | title lines, or Markdown links — or pick a .txt file. Lines that are not links are skipped and counted.Open Settings → Import, or press Import in the library toolbar.
Choose Import browser bookmarks, Import a file… or Paste links (then Preview).
In the preview, deselect any collection you do not want and reorder the incoming boards.
Press Import selected. Tabulary reports how many tabs, sessions and Home shortcuts arrived.
Exporting
Settings → Export shows your whole library as a tree with everything selected. Narrow it if you want, then export. The result is one JSON file holding boards, collections, tabs, tags, sessions, Live Collection rules and Home shortcuts. It does not include your settings or a Home background photo.
To share one collection as text, use its Copy links action: it copies the links as a Markdown list.
The destructive flows — clearing data, deleting an account — offer an export first.
↑ Contents17 — Reference
Settings, area by area
Settings opens from the sidebar in the library. The rail is grouped into Your space, Workspace, and Data & backup, with About and Support at the bottom. Esc closes it. Home’s own look is set from Customize on Home, not here.
| Area | Group | What is in it |
|---|---|---|
| Profile | Your space | Display name, profile photo, sign-in methods, linking Google or a password, changing a password, connecting Google for backup, sync status, sign out. |
| Personalize | Your space | After-saving behaviour, theme background and accent, colour mode, default layouts, new-collection placement, icon visibility, what a new tab shows, saved-tab opening behaviour, keep-one-new-tab, sidebar hover previews, and all Web Search controls. |
| Motion | Your space | Animation master switch, speed, save-destination feedback and its two per-route switches, sidebar preview animation. |
| Features | Workspace | Toolbar icon opens (Popup or Side panel), then one card each for Quick Save, Quick Access, Review, Sessions, and Live Collections — an on/off switch, a guide, and that feature’s settings inside. |
| Tags | Workspace | Create, rename, recolour and delete tags, with a usage count shown before any deletion. |
| Performance | Data & backup | On-demand diagnostics for the visible page. See Performance. |
| Data | Data & backup | Local and account data counts, copying in either direction, and the danger zone: clear device data, clear account data, delete account. |
| Import | Data & backup | Browser bookmarks, Tabulary and Toby files, and pasted or .txt link lists (OneTab included), with preview and selection. |
| Export | Data & backup | Selective JSON export of boards and collections; sessions, rules and Home shortcuts included. |
| About | — | The installed version, a short in-app changelog, and Start again for the getting-started guide. |
| Support | — | GitHub Sponsors, Ko-fi, PayPal, and the feedback form. |
How feature switches behave
Every optional capability has a master on/off switch, and the rule is the same for all of them: turning a feature off hides its entry points without deleting anything. Sessions stay saved, pending review tabs stay pending, rules stay defined. Turn it back on and everything is where you left it. Quick Save off hides the popup’s This tab card; the other sections stay.
Core safety, privacy, storage and navigation behaviour are not optional modules and deliberately have no disable switch. Feature preferences are stored in Tabulary’s private settings record, so they survive reloads and travel with backup and account sync. Two choices are kept per device instead: what the toolbar button opens, and getting-started progress.
↑ Contents18 — Keys
Keyboard reference
| Key | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Alt + Shift + T | Anywhere in the browser | The same as clicking the Tabulary toolbar button. Change it on your browser’s extension-shortcuts page. |
| tt then Space | Address bar | Searches your saved links without opening anything. Needs Quick Access on. |
| / Ctrl + K / ⌘K | Popup, side panel | Jumps to search. Typing any letter while no field has focus starts a search too. |
| ↑ ↓ | Popup search, the search box | Moves through matching saved tabs. |
| Enter | Popup search, the search box | Opens the highlighted saved tab. In the search box, with nothing highlighted, searches the web. |
| Ctrl + Enter / ⌘ Enter | Popup search | Opens the highlighted result in a background tab. |
| Shift + Enter | Popup search | Opens the highlighted result in a new tab. |
| Esc | Popup, side panel | Clears the search; with nothing to clear, closes the popup. |
| Ctrl + Shift + K ⌘⇧K | Library, Home | Opens library search. From Home, switches to the library first. |
| Ctrl + K / ⌘K | Library, Home | Focuses the search box, when it is shown. |
| Esc | Library, Home | Closes the dialog, menu, panel or search on top — only that one. |
| Esc | Dragging a Home shortcut | Cancels the drag. |
| Double-click | Collection name | Renames it in place. |
| Shift-click | Review select mode | Selects a range. |
Home shortcuts can be moved without a mouse: open a tile’s ⋯ menu and choose Move left or Move right.
↑ Contents19 — Diagnostics
Performance
Settings → Performance is an on-demand, visible-only diagnostics view. It reports only what the browser itself provides for the Tabulary page you are looking at: JavaScript heap where the browser exposes it, extension storage use, and long-task responsiveness. CPU is intentionally never estimated. You can switch between a live reading and a 60-second average, and refresh explicitly.
- Sampling happens only while that page is open and visible. Closing or hiding it stops immediately.
- There are no alarms and no continuous background monitor. Opening this page is the only time diagnostics run.
- Measurements are transient and stay on the device. They are never stored, synced, exported, or sent anywhere.
- Tabulary's background work is a Manifest V3 service worker: the browser wakes it for extension events and puts it to sleep when the work ends.
20 — Help
Troubleshooting and getting in touch
Getting in touch
Suggestions, problems, questions and kind words are all welcome through the feedback form. Tabulary is free and independent; if it earns a place in your day, GitHub Sponsors and Ko-fi are how it stays that way.
↑ Contents