Cairn remembers what you had open, so you can close everything without losing your place. No account, no sign-up. This page explains everything it does, in plain English.
On this page
Click the Cairn icon in your Chrome toolbar, or press Ctrl + Shift + Space — on a Mac, ⌘ + Shift + Space.
Cairn opens in a panel down the side of the window, next to whatever you were reading. It doesn’t take over a tab, and it doesn’t disappear when you click back on the page.
Along the top of the panel there are four buttons:
| Overview | Where you left off, your recent workspaces, and a few observations about the state of your browser. |
| Workspaces | Everything you have saved. |
| Tabs | Every tab you have open right now. |
| Cleanup | Duplicates, forgotten tabs, and things worth grouping. |
The search box above them works from anywhere.
A workspace is just a name and a set of tabs. “Kitchen renovation.” “Tax return.” “Monday’s meeting.” Open it again and those tabs come back.
Cairn remembers each tab’s title, address, icon, whether it was pinned, and which coloured group it was in. Chrome’s own settings pages are skipped, because Chrome does not let any extension reopen those.
Click Continue on any workspace. Every tab opens again, in the same groups, with the pinned ones still pinned.
Don’t want all of it? Open the workspace first and pick out the tabs you actually need. You can also add the tab you are looking at to a workspace you already saved, rename a tab to something more useful than the page title, and delete ones that have gone stale.
Restoring never closes anything. Your current tabs stay where they are, and the workspace opens alongside them.
This is the part you will be glad of one day. Cairn quietly keeps a list of what you have open — including the tabs you never got around to saving.
If Chrome crashes, or the machine restarts overnight, open Cairn and there will be a card at the top: “9 tabs didn’t come back.” From there you can:
The list never leaves your computer, and Incognito tabs are never recorded at all. You can switch the whole thing off in Settings if you would rather it did not watch.
Press / anywhere in Cairn to jump straight to the search box. Start typing and Cairn looks in four places at once: your saved workspaces, your open tabs, your browsing history, and your bookmarks. Results are grouped so you can see which is which. Click one to open it.
You can turn any of those off in Settings if the results get noisy.
The Cleanup tab finds four kinds of clutter:
Nothing closes without you saying so. Cairn shows you what it found and waits. And if you would like a second confirmation before any tab closes, there is a setting for that too.
For the ones you only need for an hour. Right-click any page and choose Mark as temporary, then pick when it should be done with: an hour, today, tomorrow, a week, or a date you choose.
Cairn still won’t close it for you. When the time is up a reminder appears in Cleanup, and you decide — clear the reminders, or keep the tabs and stop tracking them.
Every workspace has a notes box. Where you had got to, what to do next, the reference number you will need again. It is plain text, it saves as you type, and it comes back with the workspace.
A single tab can carry a note too, and this is the one most people end up using. Open a workspace, hover any saved tab, and click the pencil on the right. Write one line — “compare with Paddle before Friday”, “the bug is in step 3” — and press Enter. The note appears where the address used to be, and search finds the tab by it. Clear the text to remove it.
A week later, “Pricing — Stripe” tells you nothing. The note tells you why you kept it.
Right-click any page and choose Read later, or right-click a link and choose Read this link later. You can also press Ctrl + K and pick Read this page later.
Everything lands in one Read later list, sitting above your workspaces. When you have read something, tick it off and it leaves the list.
Open a workspace and click Remind me: later today, tomorrow morning, this weekend, next week, or a time you pick yourself.
When it comes round, the workspace waits at the top of Overview, and the Cairn icon shows how many reminders are due. If you allowed it the first time you set one, your computer also shows a notification. Saying no to that is fine — the other two still work.
Open a workspace and click Share. Cairn saves it as a file in your downloads, which you can send however you like.
The other person opens Cairn, goes to Workspaces, clicks Import, and picks the file. They get their own copy, with the tabs, groups and notes. It is a copy, not a shared folder: changes on either side stay put, and nothing is uploaded anywhere.
Cairn stores your workspaces inside Chrome, on this computer. That is private, but it also means that if Chrome’s data is cleared, or you move to a new machine, it is gone. So take a copy.
In Settings, under Data, click Export data. Cairn saves everything into one file. On a new computer, or after Chrome has been cleared, Import data brings it all back.
The file is readable text you can open, move, or email to yourself. Nothing is uploaded anywhere — there is nowhere for it to go. If you have connected an AI service, your key for it is deliberately left out of the file.
An export button is enough until the week you forget to press it. In Settings, under Data, turn on Back up automatically and choose every day or every week.
Cairn writes a copy into a Cairn Backups folder in your downloads and keeps the last ten. The first time you turn it on, Chrome asks whether Cairn may save files — that is all the permission is for. Back up now makes one straight away, and Settings tells you when the last one worked, or why it didn’t.
There is an illustrated figure in the background of the Overview screen. He reacts: a thumbs up when you save something, a worried face when you have a hundred tabs open and nothing saved.
He never speaks, never gets in the way, and never asks you to do anything. If he is not for you, there is a switch in Settings called Show the Cairn character.
Click the gear icon at the top of the Cairn panel — or right-click the Cairn icon in the toolbar and choose Options.
Light or dark isn’t in Settings: use the moon or sun button at the top of the Cairn panel. Until you pick one, Cairn follows your system.
| Shortcut | Does |
|---|---|
| Ctrl + Shift + Space | Open Cairn |
| Ctrl + Shift + K | Open the command palette — type what you want instead of clicking for it |
| / | Jump to the search box, from anywhere in Cairn |
| Esc | Clear the search, then leave the box; or close whatever is open |
On a Mac, use ⌘ in place of Ctrl. If a shortcut does nothing, another extension has probably claimed it — you can reassign it at chrome://extensions/shortcuts.
There is a right-click menu on any page too:
Nowhere. There is no Cairn account and no Cairn server. Your workspaces, notes and settings live in Chrome on your own computer, and they are deleted if you uninstall.
One thing can leave your computer, and only because you asked: an AI request, if you have connected an AI service of your own and pressed the button that sends one. Cairn tells you exactly what it is about to send, every time.
The full details are in the privacy policy.
Anything else, get in touch — questions and ideas are both welcome.