User Friendly Tab Management in Web Browsers

Modern web browsers such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox have a number of tabs to open different URLs, which makes it unwieldy and inconvenient for the user to keep track of all open tabs and navigate to the desired tabs. Often, the open tabs can be divided into related groups by identifying the user`s browsing context and intention. In this paper we present methods to identify sub browsing contexts for grouping related tabs. The method for identifying a particular sub browsing context involves tracking the tab navigation sequence of the user, clustering tabs by matching the semantic topics, and loading a new contextual tab by the user using a component called the contextual tab manager. We describe a few alternative ways for implementing the system for the Chrome browser: using the TabStripModel (for desktop), using the Chrome.tabs extension API (for desktop) and modifying the TabManager class to incorporate the context (for mobile browsers). We implement the system on the default browser of a Samsung smartphone using the third method and perform a user study to evaluate the ease of use of the system for a selection of users.