Currently i am working on a browser extension that would log the history of my tabs and the connections between them. It would be really interesting to build a graph and analyze how i work daily. What would a graph like that look like?
I can only guess, but I’ve already collected some typical use case patterns that reflect how i work with the browser.
Duplicated Tabs:
How often do i open GMail and GDocs when they are already open? The reason for this is that the so called AwesomeBar works too well, while looking for an already open tab takes time. It would be great, if the AwesomeBar could be able to search for the title of the already opened tabs.
Read It Later:
Whenever i read an article on the web, i am facing with thousands of links. Half of them take me nowhere, but i can’t help opening a few in new tabs so that i can read them later. By the time i am done with the current page, i have 2-10 tabs open on the right, which contain an infinite number of links, ad infinitum. If I compare this to a graph, it would resemble a postorder traversal.
Read It Now:
Other times i have to read the page under the link first to fully understand the content of the article. I do this typically when i read scientific text, or text in a foreign language. In the language of graphs, this is the preorder traversal.
Disposable tabs:
Very often i open new tabs for looking up some information quickly, terms in Wikipedia, words in a dictionary, money in a foreign currency. These searches will have one (or a few) results. I read them and throw the tabs away. These leaves in the graph have no children, they are dead ends, but they are necessary.
Garbage Collection:
Mozilla is doing a great job with stability, after all i don’t have to restart Firefox as often as I used to. Whenever i have too many tabs open, I close some of them to make space for the new ones and every time i do this, i feel like the garbage collector of a java runtime environment.
Without reusing already open tabs or closing the old ones, my usage graph more or less would look like a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph), which also means my tab-bar will always grow to the right and unused tabs will disappear on the left. I don’t want to close those tabs anymore. Analyzing my patterns, Firefox could close unused tabs for me after caching them on the hard drive. Make every tab disposable. Even if they are not there visually, they are in my history, i can find them with the awesomebar very quickly. I would never have to look back, the browser could do it for me and i could go forward and concentrate on my work.
Unfortunately there is a long wait until Weave is released. Web applications will stay in the browser for a while, however with a proper analysis of my browser usage, the browser could make smart decisions for me.
