Munch

Munch guide

Set up automatic tab cleanup on Mac

Choose a tab limit or an idle-time rule in Munch, with a review-first way to get comfortable.

Start with review, not automation

Munch starts with automatic closing off. Its Ready to munch list lets you see suggested tabs and choose what goes. A soft tab budget starts at 25 tabs and can be set from 5 to 200. Going over the budget shows the tabs Munch would choose to get back under it.

Try the review list first. Keep tabs with work in progress, then confirm the rest. Each link is saved before its tab closes.

Choose the rule you want

Both switches are off until you turn them on in Preferences. You can use either one, both, or neither.

  • Auto-close inactive tabs: closes eligible tabs after they have been unselected for your chosen threshold. The normal setting ranges from one hour to seven days.
  • Automatically stay under my tab limit: closes only enough eligible tabs to return to your chosen budget. This is a separate switch.

Set guardrails before switching it on

  1. Connect only the browsers you want Munch to manage.
  2. Set a comfortable inactivity threshold and tab budget in Preferences.
  3. Add sites you never want Munch to collect or close to the excluded-sites list.
  4. Set the number of leftmost tabs to protect in each window. The default is three.
  5. Review the Ready to munch suggestions, then enable one automatic switch if the choices look right.

Understand the limits

Munch skips selected tabs, excluded sites, protected leftmost positions, private Chromium windows, and Safari tabs it cannot identify with confidence. It saves a link before any automatic close, but it cannot reliably detect every playing video or unsaved form. Review mode is safer for important work.

Pinned tabs are protected by position because the browsers do not expose a reliable pin flag to Munch. If you pin more tabs than your protected count, the extras may be eligible. A saved link also does not restore page state or a full browser session.

Munch can use local browser history to help estimate when an open tab was last used. That setting is on by default and can be turned off. With it off, Munch relies on what it observes while running.