I like to think of myself as an organized person, but I’ve realized my organizational skills often stop at building an aesthetic student dashboard in Notion that’d look good on my Instagram story. My browser (and my desktop too, but that's a story for another day) tells a very, very different story and is simply the definition of chaos.

The only time it's truly under control is when I'm just watching a movie on Netflix during downtime. Unfortunately, I’m also someone who gets distracted very easily, and having a hundred tabs open at any given time only makes it worse. And when I say my browser's a mess, I'm not just talking about the endless tabs I have open 24/7. I'm talking about the dozens and dozens of extensions I forgot I even installed, all the random stuff I've bookmarked over the years, and more.

So, after years and years of endless procrastination, I finally decided it was time to do something about it. Here's exactly how I decluttered my chaotic browser.

Creating separate profiles for work, school, and personal browsing

I don't know why I didn't do this sooner

I know, I know. I should've probably done this ages ago, because it's the simplest way there is to keep everything across all the parts of your life organized. The very first thing I decided to do to fix my chaotic browser was set up separate profiles. Since I'm a full-time student, the first profile I created was for all my college-related stuff.

Then, I created a profile for work to keep all my emails, tools, and tabs related to work in one place. Finally, I set up a personal profile for everything else, like streaming, social media, and the occasional midnight Reddit browsing.

Frankly, when I first set it up, I didn't realize what a massive difference it would make. Suddenly, it made sense why browsers tend to prompt you to create separate profiles in the first place. Before I had separate profiles, my bookmarks for college assignments and lecture notes would be jumbled together with work documents and random websites.

At times, I'd have ten tabs open for an assignment due at 12 AM, another ten for a work deadline, and a few more for a shopping spree. Switching between school, work, and personal browsing was exhausting, and I constantly felt behind no matter how organized I tried to be. So, separate profiles were one of the simplest yet most effective changes I made.

Auditing my extensions for a cleaner browser

Because I don't need every extension that exists

I've always been terrible at deleting stuff once it's downloaded, and it's no different when it comes to extensions. Over the years, I've downloaded so many extensions that I barely remember what half of them even do.

For instance, my latest hyperfixation has been downloading every Chrome extension for NotebookLM I come across. While a lot of the extensions I end up downloading are genuinely useful, many just sit there. That's not a surprise, given I tend to test out a huge number of extensions I hear about for work. But my real issue is that I never go back and remove the ones I don’t actually use. Before I knew it, my extensions bar was overflowing, making it harder to find the ones I actually relied on.

So, I decided to take a couple of hours out of my schedule to audit every single extension I had installed. Since I was working with all the extensions I had collected over the years, I chose to delete them from the extensions page instead of the toolbar. This way, I could see the full list, check each one properly, and remove anything I didn’t actually need.

I went through each extension on the list and either removed the ones I hadn't used in months or kept the essentials I rely on daily. For instance, the Dark Reader Chrome extension is one I simply can't survive without, so keeping it installed was a no-brainer.

Grammarly, on the other hand, is a tool I've not touched or paid for in ages, so keeping its extension was just pointless clutter. By the end of the process, my extensions bar was slimmed down to just a handful, making it faster to find what I actually use and keeping my browser much less overwhelming.

Using extensions to manage tabs effectively

Ironic, I know

Given the section above, this probably sounds a bit ironic. After all, I had just spent hours decluttering my extensions, and now I’m talking about adding more. But hear me out. Right after I did all the above, I realized I still hadn't solved the biggest problem: my tabs were out of control.

Even with separate profiles and a clean extensions bar, I’d often have dozens of tabs open at once. I've never been a fan of tab groups, which can get messy really fast, especially when you’re juggling multiple projects at once. I recently came across a tab management extension called OneTab, which essentially lets you condense all your open tabs into a single list.

All you need to do is hit the extension's icon, and just like that, all your tabs are tucked away neatly in a single list. You can restore them individually or bring them all back at once when you need them. Before, I'd just group all the tabs I wanted and then add them to my bookmarks, which often just led to more clutter and folders I never checked.

Having all your tabs listed on a single page instead of keeping each one open individually also helps free up memory, making Chrome much faster and less sluggish. The developers even claim that OneTab can reduce Chrome’s memory usage by up to 95%, which, for someone like me with dozens of tabs open at once, is a total game-changer.

Cleaning up my bookmarks

Because 200 bookmarks aren’t helpful

The same day I was cleaning up the hundreds of extensions I’d downloaded, I decided it was finally time to tackle the bookmarks I’d been hoarding since I was a kid. Just like my extensions, they had completely gotten out of hand over the years.

I even found bookmarks for my sixth-grade science project — imagine that! I started by deleting entire folders I no longer needed, then went through the rest one by one. I also consolidated similar links into organized folders, so everything was easy to find when I needed it. My bookmarks bar had been hidden for months because the clutter was unbearable, but now it finally feels usable again.

I won't let my browser get this messy again

After realizing how much time it had taken me to declutter my browser, I made a promise to myself to never let it get that bad again. And even if it does, at least I know exactly how to get it back under control!