UnTab is a browser extension to search through open tabs, history, bookmarks and perform common browser actions in just a few keystrokes.

I started working on UnTab as a project for FOSS Hack 2020, to solve my personal problem of searching through dozens of open tabs in my browser. Since then, I have found other use cases that integrate well with the workflow of UnTab, like searching history, doing quick web searches, etc

I have open-sourced this project so that anyone can contribute plugins and themes that can extend the feature-set of UnTab. I had a great learning experience building this product and really hope it is helpful to the community.

Feel free to leave any feedback.

PS: UnTab was one of the winning projects in the hackathon!

GitHub repository: https://github.com/blenderskool/untab

This looks slick and useful, how do you feel it compares to newly (-ish) added Chrome tab search widget?

The readme in the repo does a good job of explaining the privacy implications, I was wondering if there is some to narrow either the requested permissions (can read and modify data on all pages) and the fact it talks to the network? Even if currently seemingly innocuous, the combination is a big risk that might be unnecessary for most (all?) of the functionality.

The newly added Chrome tab search widget definitely makes it easier to search and switch tabs, but it is still very much limited to just active tabs.

UnTab can search through tabs, history, bookmarks (as long as permission is given), and can also help in performing common browser actions quickly without leaving the keyboard. Along with this, the Plugins API that I'm building for UnTab is fairly powerful at this stage and would allow the community to add other useful actions and tools to the extension that I couldn't think of on my own.

Yes, I am trying to reduce the requested permissions to the point where the user allows the necessary permissions for some feature of UnTab to run if they need it.

"can read and modify data on all pages" particularly cannot be removed as that is what allows UnTab search interface to show up on the pages. network communication is again mainly for showing instant answers from DuckDuckGo searches which can be enabled if user needs it.

Will keep an eye out on other permissions if they can be minimized.

The scrolling animation thing is kind of distracting to me. Also it gets stuck when I'm scrolling down, with the graphic not changing for a while, and then suddenly skips forwards through the animation a whole bunch.

Essentially analogous to an animated intro page that doesn't play quite properly, stuttering and skipping.

Genuinely harder to use than a simpler page. Have to scroll down rather slowly to be confident that I'm not missing any of what it says.

It isn't really clear to me what this is for either. There's no link to documentation for what it can do. It says you can search your tabs. Firefox ~~and chrome~~ [edit : apparently chrome doesn't have this?? In which case yeah I see the point of this extension now.] already have that. Just type "%" followed by your search term in the url box.

Something it mentions which seems like it might be useful to me is the ability to close tabs, but it isn't clear quite what it means by that. If it means "you can say to close all tabs that match a particular search string", or something like that, that would be useful.

But, the example it shows for commands has like, commands for the back button and forwards button. There are already keyboard shortcuts for those. This makes it seem like it is saying it lets you type in a command to close the current tab, which is useless because there is already a keyboard shortcut for that.

Is this supposed to be an extension which is a platform for other extensions? It is unclear. Maybe the github page has more information?

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, the scrolling animation UX is not very good in some situations, but I really wanted to try something like this as I had never built one before. I'll add a more accessible static version of the web page that users can toggle to if they find the scrolling one uncomfortable.

I agree that the documentation is almost non existent at this point, but would work on adding it in the coming weeks. The plan is to bring common browser actions and make them more accessible via the keyboard. The features present right now definitely have room for improvement, some of which are being discussed on the GitHub repo.

I kind of want to apologize for the amount of negativity in this comment. Sorry.

I see in other comments some points about the uses of this which I hadn't seen. These make me see more the potential usefulness of this.

Looks great. Will be playing with it. My gold standard for the command palette in the browser is [Vivaldi][1], which I revisit every few months but never stick with it.

The [Eesel][2] extension is another option, but you win big for me on size: 101KiB vs 1.29MiB.

[1]: https://vivaldi.com/ [2]: https://www.eesel.app/

Thanks! Yes, size is a priority to me, most of the extensions I have seen that come close have a large size and also aren't very performant in terms of the feedback and response times.