chrome-tab-group-cleaner

Chrome has no bulk delete for saved tab groups. This is one.

71 saved groups, 70 of them left behind by Claude in Chrome. Chrome removes them one right-click at a time.

After delete --claude --orphans --restart. The one group that is not Claude's survives.

Install

As a Claude Code skill - the repo is the skill:

git clone https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/chrome-tab-group-cleaner.git \
  ~/.claude/skills/chrome-tab-group-cleaner
cd ~/.claude/skills/chrome-tab-group-cleaner && npm install && npm run build

Then ask for it: "get rid of all these Claude tab groups".

Rather have your agent read it first? Paste this into Claude Code instead:

Install https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/chrome-tab-group-cleaner as a global
Claude Code skill. First clone it somewhere temporary and read SKILL.md, README.md
and every file in src/, then tell me what it does, what it writes to, and anything
you find questionable - it deletes records from Chrome's profile database and can
quit my browser. If it looks wrong, stop and say so instead of installing.

If it checks out: clone it to ~/.claude/skills/chrome-tab-group-cleaner, run
npm install && npm run gates, and show me `node dist/cli.js list --all-profiles`.
Never delete without a --dry-run first, never quit my browser without telling me.

As a plain CLI: clone anywhere, npm install && npm run build, then node dist/cli.js --help. Node 20+, one runtime dependency.

Use

chrome-tab-group-cleaner list --all-profiles -v        # what is there
chrome-tab-group-cleaner delete --claude --dry-run     # what would go
chrome-tab-group-cleaner delete --claude --orphans --restart
chrome-tab-group-cleaner restore --backup ~/.chrome-tab-group-cleaner/backups/Default-...

Pick groups with --all, --claude, --match <text> or --regex <pattern>. Then --browser chrome|chromium|brave|edge, --profile <dir>, --all-profiles, --orphans, --dry-run, --restart, --sync-tombstone.

The browser must be quit for a delete: the store is locked, and a live browser rewrites it from memory on exit. --restart quits it and reopens your tabs. Every delete backs the whole store up first; restore puts it back.

Where they live

<user data>/<Profile>/Sync Data/LevelDB     one key per entity: saved_tab_group-dt-<uuid>

{ 1: schema version, 2: SavedTabGroupSpecifics }

SavedTabGroupSpecifics { 1: guid, 2: created µs, 3: updated µs, 4: group, 5: tab }
  group { 2: title, 3: color, 4: position }
  tab   { 1: group guid, 2: position, 3: url, 4: title }

A group is a group entity plus its tab entities - delete only the group and the tabs linger as orphans, which is how Chrome leaves them too (--orphans sweeps those). src/proto.ts reads this wire format directly, no protobuf dependency.

Sync

A profile that syncs tab groups re-downloads a local delete, so delete refuses it. --sync-tombstone commits the deletion instead: the data record goes, its sync_pb::EntityMetadata stays with is_deleted = 1 and sequence_number = acked_sequence_number + 1, which the sync processor reads as a pending commit and sends to the account.

1 client_tag_hash   2 server_id       3 is_deleted            4 sequence_number
5 acked_sequence_number               6 server_version
7 creation_time ms  8 modification_time ms                    9 specifics_hash

Those bytes are covered by tests, and the field numbers were read out of a live store. Whether a given Chrome build accepts a tombstone it did not write itself is not verified against a real account - worst case, the groups come back.

Development

npm run gates - typecheck, lint, test, build. Tests build real LevelDB stores and read them back, no mocks.

MIT