Thinking is messy.
Your tab manager shouldn't be.
Bookmarks are where links go to die. You bookmark something, you never look at it again, and six months later you're excavating a folder called "Stuff."
OneTab works—until it doesn't. One flat list, no organisation, no search worth using. Save enough sessions and it becomes its own kind of chaos.
Just leaving tabs open works—until you have 200 of them, your laptop sounds like a jet engine, and you still can't find the thing you were looking for.
Click "Save & close tabs" and everything in your current window becomes a collection. Your tabs close. Your laptop breathes again. Nothing is lost.
WhyTab names the collection based on what you were doing—"Mostly GitHub — Friday night" or "React, hooks — Feb 13 evening"—so you don't have to think about it.
Search across every tab you've ever saved—titles, URLs, collection names. Press / from anywhere to start searching without touching your mouse.
You don't need to remember which collection something is in. You just need one word from the title.
Some collections aren't archives—they're places you return to. Your reading list. Your inspiration folder. An ongoing project.
Pin them and they live at the top, always visible, always one click away. The rest of your sessions stack up chronologically below—a timeline of everything you've been thinking about.
Open Prune mode and WhyTab surfaces your oldest, least-touched collections first. Keep, archive, or delete—one decision at a time.
Most people find it oddly satisfying. Like tidying a desk that's been bothering you for months.
I built WhyTab because I was tired of losing my thinking. I'd have fifteen tabs open—all connected, all part of some thread I was pulling on—and every tool I tried treated them like a mess to be cleaned up, not thoughts worth keeping.
The problems were never dramatic. It's more that the experience of managing them is just... unpleasant. Things get buried. You can't find what you saved. Nothing feels organised in a way that actually reflects how you think. There was no calm to it.
WhyTab is built around a different idea: that a collection of tabs is a snapshot of your attention, and that's worth preserving properly. You can save an entire session in one click, or pin a single page to a collection without leaving it. Collections stay clean—you "prune" your old stuff, so you're always able to stay on top of things.
I use it every day. I think you will too.
— Aidan
Free. No account required. Works in Chrome, Edge, Brave and Arc.
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