Some releases add a headline feature. This one fixes a papercut I felt every single morning — and if you pin tabs, you felt it too.
The morning problem
Here's the ritual. Open Chervil first thing, coffee in hand. Click my first pinned tab — it spins and reloads. Click the second — spins and reloads. The third. Every pinned tab I moved to had to fetch its page from scratch, one at a time, right when I wanted to start reading.
That was by design, and the design was reasonable: when Chervil restores your session, it saves your tabs as data, and only builds a tab's live view — and fires its page load — the first time you actually click it. It keeps startup light. But for pinned tabs, that's exactly backwards. Pinned tabs are the ones you keep open because you always come back to them. They should be the first ones ready, not the ones that make you wait.
The fix: pinned tabs warm themselves up
In 0.17.0, your pinned tabs load quietly in the background the moment Chervil launches. By the time you click through them, the pages are already there. No spinner, no reload — the page you left is the page you get.
I was careful about how it does this, because "just load everything at once" would trade one problem for another:
- It's staggered. The tabs warm up one after another with a short beat between them, so a dozen pinned pages don't all slam the network at the same instant (which would slow down the tab you're actually looking at).
- It respects the tab engine's memory cap. Chervil keeps a pool of live background tabs and lets older ones sleep to save memory. The pre-warm stays inside that budget — it fills the warm slots with your pinned tabs instead of crowding out the tab in front of you. If you pin more tabs than the pool holds, the extras still load on first click, same as before.
- It costs nothing extra. This isn't an AI feature. There's no model call and no token cost — it's just loading the live sites you were about to open anyway, a few seconds earlier.
The result is the thing you want from a browser you live in: you open it and it's ready.
Tab groups now show they fold
Tab groups have been collapsible for a while — click a group's header and it folds its tabs away, click again to bring them back. The problem: nothing on the header said so. It was a colored label, and you had to already know it was clickable.
So groups now wear a little ▾ / ▸ chevron — pointing down when the group is open, right when it's collapsed. It's the same arrow every folder and disclosure control uses, and it makes the fold obvious at a glance. The behavior didn't change; it just stopped being a secret.
Open a Collection, get a group
Collections — the working sets of pages you gather from any tab's right-click menu — have an ⧉ Open all button that reopens the whole set in tabs. Handy, but the pages used to scatter across your tab strip, mixed in with everything else already open.
Now Open all drops those pages into a tab group named after the Collection. Open your "Kyoto trip" Collection and you get a Kyoto trip group — colored, labeled, all your trip-research tabs together and separated from the rest. And because of the change above, you can fold the whole group away with one click when you're done with it. Your working set arrives already organized.
Get it
Grab 0.17.0 from the GitHub releases page. Chervil is free, open source, and built in public — pinned-tab pre-warm exists because one person mentioned that his mornings felt slow. If something in your day-to-day feels like a papercut, come tell me on Discord. That's how these get fixed.