Opening the sidebar
Click the Tab Valet icon (P parking sign) in the Chrome toolbar to toggle the sidebar open or closed. You can also use Chrome's built-in side panel button near the top-right of the browser window.
Restoring a parked tab
Click the tab's title in the sidebar to restore it. The tab reopens in your browser and is removed from the parked list.
Dismissing a parked tab
Hover over a parked tab and click the ✕ button to dismiss it. Dismissing removes the tab from your parked list without archiving it. Use this for tabs you no longer need.
Archiving a parked tab
Hover over a parked tab and click the warehouse icon to archive it immediately. Archived tabs are saved to your browser bookmarks and can be reopened at any time. See Archiving Tabs for more.
Snoozing a parked tab
Snooze a tab to defer it until a specific future time. When the timer fires, the tab reappears in the sidebar ready to reopen — without cluttering your tab strip in the meantime.
To snooze: hover over any parked tab and click the clock icon. Choose a preset (Later, Tomorrow, This Weekend, Next Week) or enter a custom date and time. You can also snooze any open tab by right-clicking the page and choosing Tab Valet → Snooze Tab. See Snoozed Tabs for a full guide.
The "Coming Back" section
Snoozed tabs waiting for their wake time appear in the Coming Back section, below the Parked section in the sidebar. Tabs are sorted soonest first. Each row shows the title, domain, and scheduled wake time (e.g., "Tomorrow · 9:00 AM"). To cancel a snooze, hover over the tab and click the ✕.
The "Ready" section
When a snoozed tab's timer fires, it moves to the Ready section — highlighted in amber with a Ready badge. Click the tab title to open it immediately. Hover to re-snooze it for a later time or dismiss it permanently.
List view and Groups view
Use the List / Groups toggle at the top of the parked list to switch how your tabs are organized:
| View | What it shows |
|---|---|
| List (default) | A single chronological list of parked tabs. Click the sort button to flip between Newest first and Oldest first. |
| Groups | Tabs organized into folders by topic — Work, Development, Research & Reading, Shopping, and more. Click the sort button to flip folder order between A→Z and Z→A, and use the expand/collapse button to open or close every folder at once. |
How AI Thematic Grouping works Pro feature
Groups view sorts parked tabs into folders automatically — no manual tagging required. It works in two stages:
- Instant, built-in matching. Common, unambiguous sites — Gmail, GitHub, Amazon, and hundreds of others — are sorted into their folder the moment you park them. This is a simple lookup, so it's immediate and doesn't need AI at all.
- On-device AI for everything else. For tabs Tab Valet doesn't already recognize, Chrome's built-in local AI model reads a short summary of the page and picks the best-fitting folder. Nothing about the page ever leaves your computer. While this is happening, the tab sits in a Pending Classification section at the bottom of Groups view showing "Categorizing…", then moves into its folder once resolved — usually within a few seconds of opening the sidebar.
A few things worth knowing:
- There are about 20 built-in folders covering common categories (Work, Communication, Development, Shopping, Finance, and so on). If a tab doesn't cleanly fit any of them, the AI can mint a new folder that does — useful for niche research or personal interests a fixed list can't anticipate.
- Tab Valet learns as you go. Once tabs from the same site are classified the same way a few times in a row, that mapping is remembered — future tabs from that site sort instantly, the same way common sites do, without needing the AI again.
- If your device doesn't support Chrome's on-device AI model, unclassified tabs settle into an Other folder instead of waiting indefinitely in Pending Classification.
Comfortable view and compact view
Use the view toggle in the top-right of the sidebar header to switch between two layouts:
| View | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Comfortable (default) | Larger cards with favicon, title, domain, status label, and a short description snippet. Action buttons appear on hover. |
| Compact | Condensed single-line rows. Click any row to expand it and reveal actions. Hover to see a preview tooltip. |
Status labels
Each parked tab shows a status label indicating how recently you used it:
- Active today — you visited this tab today before it was parked
- Idle 2d (or similar) — the tab has been idle for approximately that many days
Duplicate tabs
If you have multiple tabs open for the same website, Tab Valet groups them into a single entry with a ×N badge (e.g., ×3 tabs). In compact view, click the entry to expand it. You'll see a Merge option to consolidate the duplicates.
The parking notification
When a tab is parked, a dark notification banner slides in at the top of the sidebar showing which tab was parked. It stays for 8 seconds, then dismisses itself.
- Click Undo next to a tab to immediately restore it
- If multiple tabs were parked at once, click Undo all to restore them all
- Click the ✕ to dismiss the notification early
The extension icon badge
When you have parked tabs, an amber dot appears on the Tab Valet icon in the Chrome toolbar. Hover over the icon to see the exact count (e.g., "Tab Valet · 5 parked").