MinTab

Too many tabs? Breathe your tabs - MinTab gives your browser a minty refresh!

Comment

Inspiration

Everyone knows the feeling of “tab chaos”: dozens of pages open, some forgotten, some duplicated, and important ones hidden in the clutter. Instead of building just another tab manager, we wanted to create a tool that feels like a browsing coach. With Chrome’s built-in AI, MinTab transforms clutter into clarity and adapts to the user’s daily routine.

What it does

MinTab organizes browsing into clear, actionable bundles.

  • Summarizes each tab into a one-line description.
  • Clusters similar tabs into groups such as Study, Work, Research, Shopping, Entertainment, Travel.
  • Highlights important tabs like deadlines, banking pages, forms, or notes.
  • Generates two kinds of digests:
    • Daily Digest → overview of today’s activity with suggested next steps.
    • History Digest → weekly patterns and long-term insights.
  • Activity Modes make MinTab personal:
    • With Google Calendar → reads events (e.g., “Midterm Review,” “Team Meeting”) and suggests the right bundle.
    • Without Calendar → predicts modes from browsing history at similar times.
  • Bundles can be opened, saved, pinned, or snoozed with a single click.

How we built it

MinTab was built as a Chrome extension using Manifest V3 with a React + Vite side panel. A background worker gathers tab titles, snippets, and (optionally) browsing history. Then the AI pipeline takes over:

  • Summarizer API → turns page content into one-line summaries and bullets.
  • Prompt API → clusters tabs, flags duplicates, sets priorities, and infers activity mode.
  • Rewriter API → short, user-friendly labels for bundles.
  • Writer API → generates natural-language digests for daily and weekly reports.

If users connect Google Calendar, MinTab syncs bundles with events. All processing happens locally to ensure privacy-first design.

Challenges we ran into

  • Designing prompts that grouped tabs meaningfully instead of randomly.
  • Managing performance with 30–50 open tabs (solved with batching + caching).
  • Writing summaries that are short but still useful.
  • Balancing Activity Modes between Calendar integration and history-based prediction.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Turned chaotic windows into clarity in one click.
  • Seamlessly integrated multiple Chrome AI APIs into one workflow.
  • Built a polished side panel with actions like close duplicates, save, pin, snooze.
  • Designed adaptive Activity Modes that personalize browsing.

What we learned

  • How to design prompt pipelines that transform raw browsing data into insights.
  • That simplicity wins — one “Organize” button beats many toggles.
  • AI unlocks new browsing behaviors, like resuming study sessions or building digests.
  • The importance of privacy-first architecture when handling browsing and calendar data.

What's next for MinTab

  • Collaboration & sharing → send bundles to teammates or friends.
  • Leaderboard & gamification → track Study Mode hours, compare streaks, celebrate milestones.
  • Deeper analytics → measure time per mode, highlight productivity streaks, encourage healthy habits.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates