Last updated: September 5, 2026
TabSee is a Chrome extension that shows thumbnails of your open tabs in a pinned dashboard tab, with search, site/folder filtering, and sorting. This page explains what data the extension touches, where it goes, and why.
TabSee does not have a server. It does not sell, rent, or share your data with anyone. Everything it stores lives locally in your own browser, in Chrome's extension storage, and is never transmitted to the developer or any third party except for the narrow, feature-inherent cases described below.
Tab titles, URLs, and status, across every open window — read live via Chrome's tabs API each time the dashboard is open. This is what powers the thumbnail list, search, and the site/folder filters. It is not written to persistent storage on its own.
Screenshots and preview images — a preview image is read directly out of a tab's own DOM, trying the page's og:image/twitter:image meta tag first, then a product photo from the page's own schema.org structured data if present, then the largest image actually visible on the page. That last, least-reliable tier is re-downloaded once by the extension itself and checked for being a blank/washed-out placeholder before being trusted — a match that turns out blank is discarded in favor of a real screenshot once one exists. If none of that turns up anything usable, a screenshot of the active tab is captured instead (via chrome.tabs.captureVisibleTab). Either way, nothing here is read from anywhere but the page already open in your own tab. These are cached in chrome.storage.session purely to avoid recapturing them on every render. Session storage is cleared automatically by Chrome when the browser closes; it is never synced and never leaves the device.
A site's declared brand color — the same DOM read also picks up a page's theme-color meta tag or mask-icon link color, if it has one, used as a tab's thumbnail background when no preview image is available instead of a generic placeholder icon. It's validated as a plain hex or rgb()/rgba() color before being used or cached, and discarded if it isn't. If a page declares neither, a color is instead picked deterministically from the site's hostname, entirely on-device.
A preview image's own background color — separately, once TabSee has a preview image for a tab, it re-downloads that one image itself and samples the color along its outer edge. When that edge is a genuinely flat backdrop (most studio product photos are shot on one — often white, sometimes black or a brand color), the tile behind the image is set to match it, so the image reads as filling the tile rather than sitting on a mismatched background. A busy or varied edge is left alone rather than guessed at, and the tile falls back to its own neutral placeholder color instead.
Folders and folder-to-tab tags you create — saved in chrome.storage.local so they persist across restarts. This is a purely local organizational label; it never affects, closes, or moves the actual browser tab, and is never transmitted anywhere.
A handful of UI preferences (sort order, whether the folder rail is open, whether you've dismissed the one-time thumbnail info banner, and similar) — also in chrome.storage.local.
None of the above uses chrome.storage.sync. Nothing TabSee stores is ever uploaded to your Google account or synced across your devices.
TabSee makes exactly three kinds of outbound request, all required for the feature they support:
1. Preview images. Whatever image TabSee identifies on the page — a declared og:image/twitter:image, a product photo from the page's own structured data, or the largest image visible on the page — your browser loads that image directly from whichever site already hosts it, the same request the page made to display it to you in the first place. TabSee does not add any tracking, analytics, or identifying parameters to this request.
2. A one-time re-fetch of whichever preview image is chosen. TabSee re-downloads that one image itself — the same URL the page itself already loaded, nothing new contacted, no data about you or your browsing sent with it — to read its pixels, for two reasons: for the "largest image on the page" guess only (the least reliable of the three tiers, since it's a heuristic rather than something the page declared), to check it isn't mostly a blank/washed-out placeholder before showing it, discarded rather than shown if so; and for any preview image, to sample its own background color so a tab's thumbnail can match that color instead of defaulting to a generic placeholder.
3. Favicons. Read from Chrome's own local favicon cache via the favicon permission and the browser-internal _favicon API. No third-party favicon service is contacted, and no site hostnames are sent off your device just to render an icon.
TabSee makes no other network requests: no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no calls to any server operated by the developer, because none exists.
| Permission | Why it's needed |
|---|---|
tabs | Read the title, URL, and status of every open tab, across every window, to build the thumbnail list and filters. |
host_permissions: <all_urls> | Needed alongside scripting so a preview image can be read from any open tab, not only the one currently active. |
scripting | Injects a small read-only script that looks for a preview image on the page — a declared og:image/twitter:image meta tag, a product image from the page's own structured data, or the largest image visible on the page — plus the page's declared brand color (theme-color meta tag or mask-icon color), used as a thumbnail's background when no preview image is found. It does not read page content, form data, cookies, or anything else on the page. Whichever preview image is chosen is re-downloaded once by the extension — to check the last, least-reliable image tier isn't a blank placeholder, and to sample any preview image's own background color so a thumbnail can match it. |
storage | Saves folders, cached previews/screenshots, and UI preferences, locally. |
favicon | Reads favicons from Chrome's local cache instead of a third-party service. |
Screenshots and preview images are cleared automatically every time the browser restarts. Folders and preferences persist until you remove them yourself (rename/delete a folder, or clear them) or until you remove the extension, at which point Chrome deletes all of its locally stored data.
TabSee is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect data from children.
If this policy changes, the "Last updated" date above will be revised, and the change will be reflected in the extension's next published version.
Questions about this policy or how TabSee handles data: hellotabsee@gmail.com