A tab manager in Chrome’s side panel
Keep your organized tabs visible while you browse, instead of reopening a popup every time you need them.
Your tabs, open beside the page
A popup closes the moment you click away, so anything you keep in it has to be reopened every time you need it. In the side panel Nest stays put — categories, snoozed tabs and saved sessions visible while you read, compare and work.
Turning it on
Open Nest, go to Account → Nest window, and choose the side panel. Chrome only lets one surface respond to the toolbar icon, so the change applies the next time you click the Nest icon rather than immediately — that is a Chrome constraint, not a delay on our side.
Chrome’s vertical tabs, plus the side panel
These solve different halves of the same problem, and they work well together. Chrome’s built-in vertical tab strip — right-click the tab strip, choose “Show tabs vertically” — makes your tab titles readable. It does not tell you which of those tabs belong to what you are doing right now. That is the half Nest handles, from the panel beside it.
Nest is not a tab strip replacement and does not nest tabs into a tree. Chrome supplies the layout; Nest supplies the organization. There is a fuller walkthrough in vertical tabs in Chrome: how to turn them on, including what to do when the option is missing.
When you are comparing forty things at once
Research and buying decisions are where a docked panel earns itself. You are reading one tab and holding thirty more — six vendor pages, four reviews, a spreadsheet, the three papers you have not got to. With a popup, checking what you already have means leaving the page you are reading.
The same working pattern is covered in tab management for researchers and saved sessions — the panel is what makes it survive being interrupted.
A readable list is not an organized one.
Nest sorts new tabs by domain rules, snoozes what you are not using, keeps notes on the ones you are, and makes what you closed recoverable. Free, no account, including 3 named sessions.
FAQ
Open Nest, go to Account → Nest window, and choose the side panel. Chrome only lets one surface respond to a toolbar icon, so the change takes effect the next time you click the Nest icon rather than straight away.
No, and it is not meant to. Chrome now includes a built-in vertical tab strip on desktop — right-click the tab strip and choose “Show tabs vertically”. That changes where your tabs are drawn. The Nest side panel is a second surface beside the page that adds categories, snoozing, notes and closed-tab recovery. Most people who use both keep Chrome’s vertical strip for the tab list and Nest beside it for what the tabs mean.
Yes. The surface is not a paid feature, and neither is what runs in it: categories, domain rules, snoozing, notes, closed-tab restore, local Vault snapshots and up to 3 named sessions are all free and need no account. Pro makes sessions unlimited and adds cloud sync, export and NEST Chat.
Yes, from the same setting, at any time. The surface is only where Nest is drawn — your categories, sessions, notes and snoozed tabs are unchanged by switching, and nothing is lost either way.
Put your tabs in the side panel
Free, no account. Categories, snoozing, notes, closed-tab restore and local Vault snapshots.
Add to Chrome