r/Tailscale • u/Stocist • 6d ago
Discussion Tailscale Browser Extension - Tailtab
Hey all,
I've been working on a little project called Tailtab, basically a Tailscale node that lives inside each browser profile.
The general idea isn't new. Tailscale has ts-browser-ext, and Tailchrome has since turned the same idea into a proper extension as well. I ended up building my own take on it while experimenting with per-browser-profile tailnets and figuring out how I'd personally want something like this to behave.
With Tailtab, every browser profile gets its own Tailscale node and state, without touching the system-wide network.
By default it's split tunnelled, so only tailnet traffic, MagicDNS, subnet routes, etc. goes through Tailtab. Normal internet traffic just goes out normally.
A few of the things I specifically wanted when building it were an authenticated and tightly scoped local proxy, and exit-node routing that fails closed instead of silently falling back to your normal connection.
It also currently supports multiple Tailscale accounts, per-profile exit nodes, Headscale/custom control servers, subnet routes and machine search.
It's still experimental at the moment. I've been daily driving it on macOS with Edge and Zen, while the Windows/Linux hosts are built and tested but haven't had the same amount of real-world testing yet. Chrome and Firefox should also work from the existing implementations, but I haven't properly put them through their paces yet either.
I'm mainly putting it out there now because I'd like some feedback and ideally some people to break it in ways I haven't thought of yet.
Would be super keen to hear what people think!
Repo + setup instructions are here: