A Chrome extension that holds you to six open tabs. Open a seventh and one of the other six — picked at random — takes a bullet.
Named for the revolver. Six chambers, and you do not get to pick which one comes up.
Take it for a spin...
- Visit
chrome://extensions - Turn on Developer mode
- Load unpacked → select this folder
The tab you just opened always survives. The bullet only ever finds one of the six that were already there. This holds even when two tabs open in the same instant — anything opened within the last 1.5 seconds is spared and faces its own draw instead.
One trigger pull per tab opened. Opening one tab kills at most one tab. If you install this with twenty tabs already open, it thins them out one per new tab rather than staging a massacre.
Scope decides what counts as one revolver:
- Per window (default) — each window has its own six chambers. Opening a new window is a way out.
- All windows — six tabs across the whole browser. No escape hatch.
Immunity comes in two flavours, and the difference matters:
- Pinned tabs sit outside the cylinder. They can't be shot, and they don't occupy a chamber. This is deliberate: if immune tabs still filled chambers, six pinned tabs would put you over the limit with nothing left to kill, and the extension would jam.
- Tabs playing audio and the active tab do occupy a chamber. They just can't be the one that dies.
If a full cylinder turns out to be nothing but immune tabs, nobody dies and you go over the limit. Immunity beats the six.
Session restore is exempt. Chrome replays a tab-created event for every tab it reopens at launch, so there's a five-second grace period — otherwise "continue where you left off" would be a bloodbath.
The extension icon is the cylinder, and its chambers light up brass as tabs fill them and go dark as tabs close — so a glance tells you how close you are to the next draw. Under per window scope each window's icon reflects that window's own count. If the safety's off and you somehow exceed the limit, the hub turns red.
Click the toolbar icon for the cylinder and a safety switch; Settings opens the full page. Everything above is configurable, including the chamber count, if six offends you.
npm test # drives background.js against a fake chrome API
npm run icons # regenerates icons/ from tools/make_icons.py (no dependencies)The tab-selection rules live in settings.js so the popup's chamber count, the background worker's
kill logic, and the toolbar icon's fill state can't drift apart. icon.js rasterizes the cylinder
for chrome.action.setIcon. tests/background.test.mjs fires real onCreated events at the real
listeners and asserts on which tabs actually get removed and repainted.
Copyright (C) 2026 Brian Muenzenmeyer.
Six Shooter is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See LICENSE for the full text.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.