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Cap on the number of tabs you can have open in Chrome

With the XTab extension, tab addicts can set a limit for the number of tabs they can have open at any one time.

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Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
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Matt Elliott
2 min read

There are tab managers, and then there is XTab, a tab destroyer. If you find yourself and Chrome overloaded with dozens upon dozens of open tabs each afternoon, there are a number of tab managers -- Tab Killer, Tab Resize, Tabs Outliner, and NiftySplit, for example -- you could use to control your willy-nilly Web surfing ways. And if that doesn't work, you could turn to XTabs, a Chrome extension that takes a simple, draconian approach to managing your tabs.

XTab
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

With XTabs, you set the maximum number of tabs that you can have open in any one Chrome window. The extension installs a button to the right of Chrome's URL bar. Click it and you can set the number of maximum tabs allowed; the default is 20. XTabs will not close any pinned tabs, nor does it count pinned tabs against your maximum number. Also, it will not close any tabs that you have opened in the background and have yet to visit.

XTabs offers three methods for choosing which tab to close when you surpass your tab limit. You can have it close the tab you least recently used, the least accessed tab, or the tab which has been opened the longest.

You may shudder at the thought of yielding tab-closing control to an extension, but XTabs might be just the remedy for serious tab addicts. And you can also access tabs that XTab previously destroyed by taking a gander at the Recently Closed list in your Chrome History, which is only a click away.

From Hacker News, via Lifehacker