Tabs Exposé: a macOS-style overview for Chrome and Brave
A Chrome/Brave extension that opens a visual grid of all open tabs with live thumbnails, search, drag-to-reorder, and keyboard navigation.
By midweek my Chrome usually has a few windows with a dozen tabs each, and the favicon strip stopped being legible somewhere around the eighth tab. Safari has had a tab grid for years; Chrome and Brave still don’t ship anything similar. Tabs Exposé is the extension I wrote to get one — Cmd+Shift+E opens a macOS-style grid of every open tab with a live thumbnail.
Sub-second interaction, by design
The full loop is open the overview, find the tab, jump to it, close the overview, and it should take under a second end to end. Every feature is judged against that constraint: keyboard-first navigation (arrow keys to move, Enter to switch, Delete to close, Escape to abort), search that filters in real time as you type, most-recently-used ordering so the tab you want is closest to where your eye lands.
What I left out
Other tab-management extensions on the Chrome Web Store offer tag systems, suspended-tab garbage collection, full-text search of tab content, sync to a server. None of that is in this extension. Scope discipline tends to matter more for a utility than for a product — a utility that does one thing well stays useful; a utility that grows feature surface usually doesn’t.
No build step
The extension runs directly from source — clone, load as unpacked, done. Plain JavaScript, a small Vitest suite, and a CI pipeline that re-publishes to the Chrome Web Store on tagged releases. Skipping the build pipeline keeps the extension small enough to read end to end in one sitting, which is part of what an open-source extension that handles tabs should let you do.
Was it worth it?
I use it every day. The favicon strip across the top of Chrome is still unreadable; I look at it less now.
dmorel69/chrome-tabs-expose— JavaScript, Chrome/Brave extension