How TidyTabs decides what to close, what it never touches, and how to get things back.
Idle is the time since you last viewed the tab. The sweep runs once a minute, and the popup's "Next tabs to close" list is computed by the same code that does the closing, so what it shows is exactly what will happen.
Tabs that are active, pinned, playing audio, kept ("Keep tabs on this page"), or in a tab group. Sites you exclude are additionally protected from auto-close. This applies to every feature that closes or parks.
You get the page back: everything closed waits in the history view for your chosen retention window, and restoring reopens the address. What comes back is a fresh load of the page, not a snapshot: unsaved form input or in-page state the site doesn't preserve is gone, the same as closing the tab yourself. In practice the idle limit protects work in progress (a tab you're typing in is active, not idle), but no extension can see unsaved input, so don't rely on auto-close being form-aware.
No. Downloads belong to the browser, not the tab, so they continue after the tab closes.
Open, ordinary, web tabs. Open: parked entries and closed pages are invisible. Ordinary: pinned tabs and tabs inside a tab group never participate. Web: only http(s) pages, so blank new tabs and browser pages never count. Detection spans all your windows, not just the one you're looking at.
No. Blank new tabs are not duplicates of each other. They never show in the count and Clean now never touches them.
No. Duplicates and parking never see each other. An open tab that matches a parked entry is not a duplicate, and cleaning duplicates never touches the parked list.
It only fires on a brand-new tab's first navigation, in ask mode. Reloads, back and forward, session restore, and TidyTabs's own restores never prompt.
Depends who asked. Auto-return slips backlog in at the left edge, quietly. When you restore a tab yourself it opens on the right, focused, like any tab you just opened.
The list keeps one entry per page. Parking a page that is already on the list refreshes that entry instead of adding a second one, which is exactly enough to bring the page back.
Its page was already open in that window, so the entry retired instead of opening a copy. Nothing was lost; the page is right there.
Two guarantees cover it: the parked list never holds two entries for the same page, and a returning tab is skipped when its page is already open in the window it belongs to. The one gap is across windows: a copy open in a different window doesn't block the return, so the same page can end up open in two windows. The duplicates count catches that pair and Clean now collapses it.
Everything left is protected: active, pinned, playing audio, kept, or not a web page. TidyTabs overflows rather than force-closing protected tabs. Tabs in a tab group don't count toward the budget at all.
No. A tab that auto-returns is treated like a tab you just opened: its idle clock starts over, so it gets your full limit before auto-close can consider it again.
Auto-return brings tabs back as room opens, and auto-close may later expire them like any idle tab; expired tabs land in the history view. Parked tabs are backlog, not a vault. Mark a page Keep if it must survive no matter what.
The history view (the clock icon in the popup). Each closed window's parked set waits there; restore it as a window if you still need it, or clear it when you're done.
Restoring un-parks. The tabs became ordinary tabs, so closing them was an ordinary close. The parked list is a backlog queue, not a saved-sessions manager.
Windows don't keep their identity across a restart, so every parked entry's window is technically gone. A restart is a checkpoint: your backlog waits in the history view instead of streaming back in.
The history view, under "Closed tabs". Everything TidyTabs itself closes is recorded before it closes, so you can reopen it from there for as long as your history setting keeps it. Duplicates are the exception: closing a copy needs no record, because the surviving identical tab is the record.
Parked tabs in open windows: never. The history view follows the "Keep closed tabs for" setting: 7 days by default, up to 90. Everything else is a button you click, confirmed with an exact count.
They don't, on purpose. A group is you saying "I organized these", so grouped tabs are outside TidyTabs's reach entirely: never counted toward the tab budget, never parked, never auto-closed, and never counted as duplicates. The one touchpoint: the duplicate prompt can switch you to a tab inside a group; it only ever closes the new loose one.
Yes. When groups exist, the dashboard shows a Tab groups card with two buttons: Ungroup all keeps the tabs and dissolves the groups, Close all closes every grouped tab for good. Both confirm with exact counts first. TidyTabs never touches groups on its own.
Keep protects one page: no auto-close, no parking, and it stays on a visible list you can reopen even after the tab closes. Excluding a site protects a whole domain from auto-close only; those tabs can still be parked (restorable) and still count as duplicates (an identical tab always survives).
Yes, when an identical tab stays open. The kept entry just re-binds to the surviving copy. Kept pages are never lost.
No. There's no account, no server, and no analytics. Tab addresses and titles are processed on your machine and never transmitted. Details in the privacy policy.
Email dev@pockadot.com and a human will get back to you.