Dormant
Adaptive tab suspension for Chromium: a multi-signal scoring engine frees memory without touching the tabs that matter, with tiered states, workspaces, rules, and a command palette.
- Year
- 2026
- Spent
- Early development
- Role
- Full-stack build
Why we built this.
Every tab suspender we tried only reacts to a timer, so it suspends the video you paused for thirty seconds and keeps the docs tab you forgot about a week ago. A timer doesn't know which tabs matter.
Quick facts.
- 3
- suspension tiers
- None
- telemetry
- Zero
- keys shipped
Built a scoring engine that combines idle time, memory pressure, tab role (chat, media, docs, background app), user affinity, and network or battery context, feeding tiered states from frozen (Chrome discard) to vaulted (removed from the strip, fully searchable). Workspaces sit on Chrome tab groups, and a declarative rules engine expresses things like 'suspend YouTube unless audio is playing'. Optional AI is bring-your-own-key, so no keys ever ship in the extension.
What we learned.
A tab manager that frees memory by understanding your tabs, not just timing them.
Early development, unpublished, local-first: the kind of thing we build for ourselves first.
Overview.
Dormant is a Chromium extension that suspends tabs you aren't using to free memory and CPU, while leaving alone the ones that matter: playing audio, holding form input, pinned, or active. It goes past a timer with a multi-signal scoring engine (idle time, memory pressure, tab role, affinity, network and battery), tiered states (frozen, suspended, vaulted), workspaces built on Chrome tab groups, a declarative rules engine, full-text-searchable previews, and a command palette. Optional AI features (summaries, semantic search, auto-grouping) are bring-your-own-key. No telemetry, no ads, local-first.
- Preact
- TypeScript
- Dexie
- MiniSearch
- Zod
- Chrome Extensions API
- Multi-signal scoring
- Tiered suspension
- Workspaces + rules
- Command palette
- Local-first, no telemetry
consolelog.tools
Web App
ContinueWant to see the client work?
This is where we experiment. The paid work lives next door.