What is ContextTab?
ContextTab is a Chrome tab manager that records how you got to each page, and draws your open tabs as a branching map of that trail. It does what a tab manager does — group, park, search, restore, export — and adds the one thing none of them keeps: the reason each tab is there.
Twenty tabs into a question, the tabs themselves stop meaning anything. You can see that a page is open; you cannot see that you opened it from the third result of a search you ran because a comment on an issue mentioned a phrase you highlighted an hour ago. That chain is the actual work, and the browser throws it away the moment it happens.
ContextTab keeps it. Every page arrives with its cause attached — the link you followed, the phrase you selected, the search you ran — so what you get back is a tree with reasons on the edges. You can rename a branch, note a page, park the branches you are not reading, search across all of them, and hand the whole thing to somebody as a Markdown document.
What it actually does
- It records provenance
- Which page led to which, and why. A branching trail rather than a flat list of addresses.
- It parks what you are not reading
- Freeze a branch and its tabs are discarded from memory but kept on the map, with their notes and scroll positions. Thaw one and the page comes back where you left it.
- It hands you a document
- One click turns a branch, or a whole session, into Markdown — plain outline, Obsidian links or Slack-flavoured — with the trail, your highlights, your notes and a source list. JSON too, when something else has to read it.
- It stays out of the way
- A side panel or a rail on the edge of the page, on whichever side you like, that folds itself away when you have not touched it.
How it compares to other tab managers
A bookmark records that a page exists. A tab manager records that a tab is open, and the good ones group and suspend them. Neither records why. That is the whole distinction: ContextTab's unit is not the page, it is the step from one page to the next, and the step is what carries the reason.
- Collapsing tabs into a list
- The classic move: every open tab becomes one row of links and the memory comes back. What returns is that list — the addresses, without what you were doing when you opened them.
- Saving and restoring sessions
- A snapshot of a window, reopened later. Excellent for "what was I doing on Tuesday"; it is a photograph of a moment rather than a record of how the moment came about, and you have to remember to take it.
- Sorting tabs into workspaces
- Group by project so you only see the project you are on. The organising is yours to do and to keep doing, and it describes what a tab is for rather than where it came from.
- The browser's own tab groups
- Colour-coded groups and pinned tabs, built in and free. They are a good place to put tabs, and ContextTab syncs its branches to them — so using both is the expected case rather than a compromise.
- What ContextTab adds
- All of that category's work — parking to free memory, search across open and parked pages, restore with scroll position, export — plus the trail: the link you followed, the search you ran, the phrase you highlighted. That is the part you cannot reconstruct a week later, and the part nothing else keeps.
In practice the difference shows up when you come back. A folder of bookmarks from last Tuesday is twelve addresses you have to re-read to understand. The same session in ContextTab is a shape you recognise immediately, with your own note on the page that mattered.
What it costs
Basic is free. No account, no card, no expiry. It tracks up to 30 pages at a time and includes parking and thawing, search, the whole interface, and Markdown and JSON export.
Pro is $3.99 a month, or $44.99 a year — $3.75 a month, about 6% less. It removes the 30-page ceiling, merges trees across windows, and adds notes with due dates and checklists, AI summaries using an API key you supply, and ten extra colour modes. It starts with a free trial, needs a Google sign-in so the subscription can follow you between machines, and renews automatically until you cancel. The exact amount in your currency, including any tax, is shown at checkout before anything is charged. The pricing page has the detail, and the terms cover cancellation and refunds.
Where your browsing goes
Nowhere. The map lives in your browser's own storage on your own machine; there is no sync server and no code path that could add one. Signing in for Pro answers exactly one question — is this account entitled — and the server stores a salted hash of your Google id, your email address, your subscription status and its dates. Never a page you visited. The privacy policy itemises every field.
The AI features are the same shape: the request goes from your browser straight to whichever provider you configured, using a key you supply and we never see.
Which browsers it works in
Any Chromium browser — Google Chrome, Brave, Microsoft Edge, Arc, Vivaldi and Opera — on Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. Open the dock with Alt+Shift+D, which on a Mac is ⌥ Option+⇧ Shift+D — the same keystroke, since Chrome maps Alt to ⌥ there.
Who it is for
People whose work is following a question across many pages: researchers and academics, developers moving between documentation and issue trackers, analysts, lawyers, journalists — anyone who regularly finishes a session with thirty tabs open and no memory of why the twelfth one is there.