Background
One day in my office, I saw my college opened more than 30 tabs in his Chrome, and when I ask him for help with a service, he can’t find the tab he opened :D. He has tried to use some extensions to organize his tabs, but we found that they are not smart enough to help him - they are all using domain name to group tabs.
Then I thought, why not use AI to help him? We can easily use OpenAI’s API to do this, judging the tab category by its metadata. So I started the project in the evening.
Development
1. Feasibility study
First, I need to know if it is possible to use AI to do this and how easy it is to do this.
I found an open source project Auto Group Tab, which is using domain name to group tabs. I cloned and found that Chrome has already provided an API to group tabs! And I can easily get the metadata of a tab by using Chrome’s API.
Then I created a minimal project to test if it is possible to use OpenAI’s API to do this. I use a starter template chrome-extension-typescript-starter to create a Chrome extension, and use OpenAI’s API to get the category of a tab. It works!
2. Development
Then I started to develop the extension. I’ve built some Chrome extensions like Neckium before, so I know how to do this.
First, I defined some default tab categories including News, Social, Video, Development, Learning, Others. Then I created a popup page to show the tabs and their categories, and a background page to listen to the tab update event and send the tab data to OpenAI’s API.
3. Open source
After I finished the development, I open sourced the project on GitHub. And then I posted a tweet to share the project. Out of my expectation, people seems to like it! I’ve got more than 300 stars in the next 24 hours! And the project even got featured on GitHub Trending page for three days!
And luckily, I’ve met some other developers who have the same idea and want to contribute to the project. Now the project has more than 800 stars and 14 contributors!
4. Publish to Chrome Web Store
After the project got some attention, I decided to publish it to Chrome Web Store. Now you can install the extension here. Don’t forget to leave a review if you like it!
Future
We think the best way to grouping tabs is not using OpenAI API, but using a machine learning model trained by ourselves and running in the browser. So people don’t have to worry about privacy and their tokens. We are working on this and hope we can release it soon!