Chrome Extension - SmartTabs Organizer

From a Python/backend perspective, developing the extension was quite straightforward. An embedding (vector representation of the data) is calculated for all tab titles, and these are sorted into a cluster using unsupervised learning. The embeddings encode the context and contain semantic meaning. This results in better quality compared to pure keyword matching.

The biggest hurdle was the frontend, which was the plugin's popup dialog, as it has to save states. The popup itself is vanilla HTML. In the background of the Chrome extension, a job runs every five minutes to add new tabs to existing tab groups.

A simple plugin, available free of charge.

The plugin had approximately 3,500 installations at the end of 2024.

Although the Chrome Plugin Store is an inviting playground, there are some things I learned.

The positive thing about plugin stores is that users can find your extension without you having to worry about SEO. With the right keywords, your own extension will definitely be found. On the negative side, however, are the actual users. Although a free plugin tends to come with the idea that it is free, we are in a B2C market. And B2C market is tough. Sometimes users give bad reviews due to lack of functionality or frustration. Reading such reviews the first time can hurt. You wonder why users give unfair and very subjective ratings. For example, there was one user who wanted to sort over 800 tabs, or another person who gave a bad rating because of a lack of local LLM integration. However, this is part of the job, and the rude comments trigger you less and less.

Monetizing such extensions is another problem. So far, I have not been able to come up with a concept that would at least cover the monthly fixed costs for backend hosting. I think this is the case for many in this field, and some extensions contain ads. However, since I believe that there is already enough advertising on the internet, this was never an option for me. After running the plugin for several years (2021-2025), I discontinued it in Q1 2025. It was a very educational experience, and I will remember the first 1,000 users fondly.