Chrome Save Tabs

Purpose

Built to solve a personal pain point: losing track of open tabs when closing Chrome. At the time, browsers did not natively support saving and restoring tab groups, so this filled a real gap.

Stack

What I Learned

• The Chrome Extension architecture is surprisingly simple — a manifest.json, a background script, and a popup UI is all you need to get started
• manifest.json is the contract between your extension and the browser — it declares permissions, entry points, and capabilities
• Publishing to the Chrome Web Store follows a similar review process to mobile app stores but with a much faster turnaround
• The chrome.tabs API gives you full read/write access to the user's tab state — powerful but requires careful permission scoping
• Building browser extensions is one of the fastest ways to ship a useful tool to real users with minimal infrastructure

Key Insights

• Chrome extensions follow the same manifest-driven architecture pattern as many platform plugins — understanding manifest.json transfers directly to PWA manifests, VS Code extensions, and more
• The best side projects solve a problem you personally have — you are both the developer and the most demanding user
• Sometimes the best time to build something is right before the platform adds it natively — you learn the problem space deeply, even if the product eventually becomes obsolete