Hibern8 Ctrl+Space

Hibern8 Ctrl+Space (available soon in Lite!) gives you hands-on control over the memory your open tabs use.

It uses your browser's own native tab-discard to unload idle tabs and return their allocated memory to your system, so you decide what sleeps and what stays awake. A hibernated tab reloads from its own source when you come back to it, so the design leans on cheap bandwidth instead of hoarding data in RAM.

Press Ctrl+Space to open the panel from anywhere in your browser (you can change or reassign the shortcut in your browser's extension-shortcuts settings).

What it does: Hibernate idle tabs one at a time, a whole window at a time, or all windows at once. Active, pinned, and audio/video tabs are always spared.

See every window in its own group, with active, awake, and hibernated tabs listed separately.

Mirror your existing browser tab groups in the panel (Chrome / Edge).

Find and mute anything playing sound, per tab or all at once.

Close any tab, including hibernated ones, from the panel.

See illustrative memory and power estimates for what you have reclaimed.

Optional screen-time timer with a simple break reminder (off by default).

Optional Safe-Hold: holds the browser's outbound page traffic and pauses in-progress downloads until you manually release it, so nothing quietly reloads or keeps transferring on untrusted Wi-Fi before your VPN is up.

Personalize the look with themes, fonts, and a color/greyscale accent slider that also repaints the toolbar icon to match.

Privacy and security: No data collection or transmission. No servers, no analytics, no ads, no telemetry, and no third-party code. Everything runs locally in your browser profile.

No host permissions. It never reads or edits the content of any web page.

Strict Content-Security-Policy blocks inline and remote scripts; there is no remote code and no network calls. An injection watchdog warns you in the panel (and prompts an antivirus scan) if a script injection is ever blocked.

The full privacy statement (PRIVACY-AND-SECURITY.md) and the license (EULA.md) ship with the extension.

Honest limitations (please read before installing): Memory and power figures shown in the panel are illustrative estimates, not measurements. Your browser's task manager (Shift+Esc on Chrome/Edge, or about:performance on Firefox) shows the real numbers.

Waking a hibernated tab reloads that page from its own source over the network. That is the tab's normal traffic, not the extension sending your data anywhere.

Safe-Hold is a browser-level convenience layer, not a substitute for your VPN client's own kill-switch or your operating-system firewall, which protect every app system-wide.

A browser extension cannot detect a VPN. The "require VPN" option is a manual confirmation: releasing the hold asks you to confirm your VPN is connected.

Provided as-is, without warranty. It is not a certified, security-attested, or independently audited product.

Permissions this build requests, and why: tabs: list, hibernate, mute, close, and switch tabs, and read title/URL/state to draw the panel.

tabGroups: mirror your existing browser tab groups (Chrome / Edge).

favicon: show site icons from the browser's own local cache.

storage: save your local preferences and state.

bookmarks: add or remove a bookmark when you use the bookmark control.

alarms: run the once-a-minute tick for the optional screen-time timer.

idle: count only active time for the optional screen-time timer.

notifications: show the optional break reminder and the injection-watchdog alert.

declarativeNetRequest: block the browser's outbound page requests during Safe-Hold (block-only; contents are never read or modified).

downloads: pause and resume in-progress downloads during Safe-Hold (files are never read, opened, or moved).

incognito (spanning): let bulk actions reach private windows only if you separately enable "Allow in Incognito."