There is a particular kind of tab extension that wants to help you. It groups things. It suspends things. It suggests you close the seventeen you opened on Tuesday. Some of them will close things for you.
tab•tally counts. When the count gets high it says so, once, quietly. Then it goes back to counting.
Nothing is closed for you. Nothing is suspended, grouped, archived into a list you will never open again, or synced anywhere. If you want forty tabs open, you can have forty tabs open, and the number will say forty.
Two permissions, and no site access
This is the part worth knowing if you are the sort of person who reads the install dialog.
tab•tally asks for storage and alarms. That is the complete list. It has
no host permissions at all — it cannot read any page you visit, because it
never needs to. It counts tabs. What is in them is not its business and it has
not been given the means to find out.
The other two extensions here do ask for every site, and their reasons are printed on the home page next to the request. tab•tally is the one that asks for nearly nothing, and it is a useful demonstration of the general rule: the permission list should be short because the tool is small, not because the description is careful.
The rejection that made it smaller
The first submission, in May, was rejected by the Chrome Web Store. The reason
was an unused permission — it declared tabs and did not use it for anything
the description justified.
That was a fair rejection. The declaration was left over from an earlier shape of the code, and nothing in the review process is meant to take "I forgot" as an answer. The fix was not to write a better justification. It was to delete the permission, because it turned out nothing needed it.
It went live on 27 August 2026, at version 1.1.2, with a permission list half the length of the one that got refused.
There is a related note in the workspace about page•pin requesting
unlimitedStorage and no code using it — the same violation type, still open,
and it will be removed before that extension is next submitted rather than
argued for.
What it is for
The pile-up you have stopped noticing. Not a productivity system, not a workflow, and not an intervention. A number, when the number is worth having, and silence the rest of the time.
tab•tally on the Chrome Web Store — free, two permissions, no site access.