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Show HN: My first Chrome extension (TabZolo.co)

9 points by mrdazm ↗ HN
I had an idea to build a Chrome extension to help stay on track with browsing the internet in today's multi-tab-able browsers. I wanted a solution that would encourage (ie, force) me to finish my business on a single given tab before going on to doing something else in another. TabZolo is the result of my dabbling with a buddy.

Using the chrome.* APIs, when enabled, the extension forces you to use one tab and window (except incognito windows - but I probably shouldn't have told you that) and kills any new tabs/windows that get created instead replacing the current tab with the new URL.

You can check it out at www.tabzolo.co. It's completely open-sourced on GitHub too if anyone wants to extend its functionality.

What do you think of it?

For more on TabZolo:

GitHub - https://github.com/dasmall/TabZolo

My blog post - http://dazm.co/weekend-project-tabzolo-co/

My co-creator's post - http://leonardocorrea.com/posts/2013-07-14-tabzolo-to-the-rescue/

LifeHacker Mention - http://lifehacker.com/tabzolo-keeps-you-focused-on-one-tab-at-a-time-845544805

4 comments

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jaredsohn
You should be able to support tabs open in incognito windows as well if users grant your extension incognito access.
mrdazm
Probably but as a web developer I hold incognito mode sacred.
cthackers
That's nice. But I kinda like the multi tab feature. It was the biggest thing to happen to browsers before HTML5. Usually when I google something I open the first 4-5 pages that look relevant so I can quickly scan their content. Even on HN I open 10+ tabs with the stories that seem interesting and then start reading them. But I'm sure there will be users who need this. Good job.
mrdazm
By no means were we trying to abolish tabs; we pretty much just wanted to help minimize the number of ways to get distracted from any single task. It's not something we envisioned being on all the time per se. It's more for a serious focus session.