Arc Tab Archive Gone? 4 Chrome Replacements TESTED (2026)

Arc Tab Archive closed tabs automatically after 12 hours, 24 hours, or 7 days (whichever you configured). Tabs moved to an Archive section rather than disappearing permanently, and you could browse or search the archive to reopen them. Chrome has no equivalent built in. Memory Saver suspends tabs but never removes them. Four Chrome options cover what Archive did.

What Tab Archive Actually Did (and Why Memory Saver Isn’t It)

Before getting into replacements: the distinction matters.

Arc Tab Archive closed tabs on a timer. The tab left the tab strip entirely, moved to the Archive section in Arc’s sidebar, and was recoverable from there. Ram was freed because the tab was gone. The cleanup was visible: fewer tabs in view, a shrinking active list.

Chrome Memory Saver suspends tabs. The tab stays in the bar, the favicon stays, the title stays. Chrome evicts the page’s content from RAM, freeing 90-95% of a tab’s memory, but to you it looks exactly like an open tab. There is no pruning. There is no archive. After a week you still have 80 tabs in the bar, they’re just unloaded.

These are different tools for different problems. If you used Arc Tab Archive for RAM savings, Memory Saver solves the same underlying problem by a different mechanism. If you used it to actually reduce tab count and surface only what was active, Memory Saver does nothing for you.

Tab Wrangler: The Direct Functional Match

Tab Wrangler (v8.3.0, updated April 30, 2026 on the Chrome Web Store) is the closest Chrome equivalent to Arc Tab Archive. Set an inactivity timer (default: 20 minutes) to 720 minutes (12 hours), 1,440 minutes (24 hours), or 10,080 minutes (7 days) to match Arc’s presets exactly. Tabs that go untouched close automatically. The Tab Corral stores everything Tab Wrangler has closed, searchable and reopenable at any time.

The protections work the way Arc’s did: pinned tabs are never archived, audio tabs are protected while playing, and you can lock individual domains to prevent them from ever closing.

The main difference from Arc is UI depth. In Arc, the Archive was part of the sidebar: tabs slid into it visually and you could scan archived items in context. Tab Wrangler’s Corral is a separate panel you open manually, closer to a list than a visual space. Functionally identical; aesthetically a step down from what Arc built.

Tab Wrangler is free on the Chrome Web Store. No account, no sync.

Chrome Memory Saver: Right Problem, Wrong Tool

If your reason for using Tab Archive was RAM (keeping Chrome from eating system memory as tabs accumulated), Memory Saver covers that use case better than Tab Wrangler does.

Navigate to Chrome Settings → Performance → Memory Saver and toggle it on. Chrome will discard inactive tabs automatically, freeing 90-95% of each tab’s RAM, while keeping them visible in the bar. You click a discarded tab and it reloads.

It does not clean up the bar. Tabs accumulate indefinitely. After three days of normal browsing you have the same visual chaos you had with Arc, minus the memory pressure. Memory Saver solves the RAM problem but leaves the tab-count problem entirely to you.

SuperchargeNavigation: Workspace Organization Before You Archive

SuperchargeNavigation does not auto-close tabs by age. That feature does not exist in the extension. What it does is address the upstream problem Arc Tab Archive often solved by accident.

A significant share of Arc’s archived tabs were tabs you meant to get to but never did: research threads, reference pages, things you opened in a context that has since passed. Arc archived them so they stopped cluttering the active view. Nav handles this through workspaces instead.

Named workspaces give each project or context its own isolated tab environment. A Work workspace, a Personal workspace, a Research workspace. Tabs in the Research workspace do not pollute your Work view. The 50 auto-snapshots (saved every 5 minutes) mean you can close an entire workspace and recover it later without any manual bookmarking. The command bar (Alt+K) searches across all workspaces so you can find a tab without knowing which workspace it’s in.

For Arc users who used Tab Archive to manage context sprawl, the workspace model removes the root cause. If tabs are organized into workspaces, fewer of them need archiving. The ones that do can be closed manually or handed off to Tab Wrangler.

Nav is free, zero telemetry, no account required.

Which Approach Fits Which Arc Workflow

The last row is the realistic recommendation for most Arc power users. Workspaces keep active contexts separated so you know what’s actually in play. Tab Wrangler handles the background cleanup: anything that hasn’t been touched in a day or a week goes to the Corral automatically. That is architecturally close to what Arc built: workspace structure on one side, automatic archiving on the other, even if the UI integration is looser.

Chrome is not going to give you a native Tab Archive. The extension layer can approximate it. Tab Wrangler for the closing mechanism, SuperchargeNavigation for the organizational layer underneath it. Neither one alone covers the full picture Arc’s Archive was solving.