Tabs Outliner
What Tabs Outliner actually does
Tabs Outliner opens a side panel showing every open window and tab as a tree. Live tabs appear in color; tabs you've "saved" (closed) appear greyed out. You can add text nodes to annotate anything in the tree — a note before a group of related tabs, a label for a section, a reminder about what a window is for.
The core operation is parking: you close a tab (or a whole window's worth of tabs), and Tabs Outliner keeps a greyed node in the tree. Click it later and the URL reopens as a fresh tab. The tree itself is persisted across browser restarts, so even if Chrome closes, your saved nodes are there when you come back.
What Tabs Outliner does not do is keep tabs alive. Saved (greyed) nodes are stored URLs — not live tabs. When you restore one, you get a fresh page load. Form data, scroll position, an AI conversation mid-session, a streaming response, a half-uploaded file — none of it survives the park-and-restore cycle. The tree is a list of places you've been; the tabs themselves are gone.
What Duotang actually does
Duotang organizes tabs into named workspaces that stay loaded in the background. Switching workspaces doesn't close anything. The Gmail tab you had open this morning is the same tab this afternoon — same DOM, same scroll position, same session cookie, same draft you were writing. Nothing reloads because nothing closed.
When you explicitly close a workspace's window, Duotang saves a snapshot and restores it when you reopen — scroll position included, though transient state like form data doesn't survive a full close, the same as a browser restart. This is still categorically different from Tabs Outliner's park-and-restore, which loses everything including scroll position on every park operation.
The core difference
Both tools help you manage more tabs than Chrome's tab bar can comfortably show. But they disagree on what "manage" means.
Tabs Outliner says: close the tabs, keep the URLs. The tree is your memory; the browser is your viewer. When you want to go back to something, reopen it fresh.
Duotang says: the tab is the work. Don't close it — move it to a workspace and come back to it exactly as you left it. When you want to go back to something, switch workspaces and it's there.
If most of what you work in are simple pages where a fresh reload is equivalent to where you left off, Tabs Outliner's model is lightweight and works fine. If you live in SPAs — Notion, Gmail, Linear, Figma, ChatGPT, Slack, GitHub — reloading from a URL gives you a blank slate. The work is in the state, and the state is gone.
When Tabs Outliner is the right choice
- You want a hierarchical overview of every open window and tab in one panel
- You like annotating your tabs with inline text notes and labels
- Your workflow is "park tabs for later reading" more than "switch between live working contexts"
- The pages you work with reload cleanly and don't have meaningful in-tab state
- You prefer a dedicated panel view rather than a sidebar on every page
When Duotang is the right choice
- You want context switches that don't lose your work — drafts, scroll position, AI sessions, active uploads
- You work in named workspaces — one for client work, one for research, one for admin — and switch between them throughout the day
- You work in SPAs where reloading from a URL means starting over (Notion, Gmail, Figma, ChatGPT, Linear, Slack, GitHub)
- You want search across all your tabs and workspaces from any page, without opening a separate panel
- You want your tabs always current, not a URL saved at some point in the past
Keep every tab alive across every project switch — free, no account.
Install Duotang