Stash saves your open tabs so you can close them without losing them, and later find any of them again. Here is what it does, in plain terms, including the parts that do not work so you know what to expect.
Click the Stash button and it puts every open tab in the window into one saved group, then closes those tabs. Your browser goes quiet and your memory is freed, but nothing is lost. You can also press Ctrl + Shift + S (Cmd + Shift + S on a Mac), or right-click a page to save just that one tab.
Each group gets a name based on the sites and the time it was saved. You can rename it to anything you like.
Open a group to see the pages inside it. You can bring the whole group back at once, or click a single tab to open just that one. When you open a single tab out of a group, Stash removes it from that group, since it is open in your browser again. If that was not what you wanted, there is an undo button on the message that appears.
The search box looks in two places at the same time: the tabs you have open right now, and everything you have saved. Type a word and you get both, split into "open now" and "in your stash", so you can jump to any tab without hunting through windows.
This is the part most tab tools do not do. When you save a tab, Stash also remembers the text that was on the page, not just its title and address. So weeks later you can search for a phrase you remember reading, and Stash will find the page even if those words were never in the title. The result shows a short snippet of the matching text so you can see why it came up.
Along with the text, Stash keeps a clean, readable copy of the page's main content. On a search result you will see a small book icon. Click it and the saved copy opens straight from your device. It loads instantly, works with no internet, and still works even if the real page later changes or goes away.
Reading page text works on most normal websites. It does not work on browser pages (like Chrome's own settings pages or the Chrome Web Store), on PDF files, or on some sites that block scripts. When a page cannot be read, Stash still saves it as a normal link. You just will not be able to search inside that one.
Search inside pages only applies to tabs you save from now on. Tabs you saved before this feature existed are still there as links, but they have no saved text.
Everything Stash saves stays on your own computer. That includes the page text and the saved copies. There is no account, no sign-in, and no server. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is sold, and no other company is involved. Stash only reads a page's text at the moment you choose to save that tab. It never reads pages in the background.
When you delete a group or empty the trash, its saved text and saved copies are deleted too. Uninstalling Stash removes all of it. For the full details, read the privacy policy.