Segregating User Data by Tabs in Web Browsers Kapil Kumar, Joy Bose Web Solutions Samsung R&D Institute India- Bangalore Bangalore, India {kapil.kumar, joy.bose}@samsung.com Abstract— The popularity of multi tabbed browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox or Internet explorer has led to exploration of new ways to organize browser data in the different tabs. In tabbed browsing, different tabs on a web browser are typically used for different contexts. For example, one tab may be used for checking email and another for reading the news. However, the user data, such as bookmarks and history, is only accessible together rather than being segregated by context. In this paper we mention two approaches to organize tab specific browser data in different tabs: firstly by having an additional tab id field to identify the tab in the user data in the browser such as history, cookies and bookmarks; and secondly by clustering and displaying browser data by context. We mention new user interfaces based on clustering of user data and tab based grouping. Finally, we study the effect of these changes on the browser performance. Index Terms— android; web browser; tabbed browsing; user data I. INTRODUCTION In most modern web browsers such as IE, Firefox and Chrome, browsing is multi tabbed, with the user being able to use different tabs simultaneously for browsing different URLs. Nowadays in modern web browsers, it is very common to use multiple browser tabs for different tasks. This multi-tab solution allows users to perform activities such as search the web, check emails, or watch videos in different tabs in a single browser instance. Quite often, multiple tabs are used for different contexts, with one tab for checking email, another for watching videos and so on. In current web browsers, the user data is stored together and not segregated by context. This could cause problems in certain cases, such as when the user needs to access their data separately by tab or by context. In this paper, we propose to store and display the user data such as history and cookies along with the context, which can be tab context or clustering as per similarity of browsed content. This will enable the user to access and modify their user data as per the original context it was viewed in, or the action or group of actions they were originally trying to perform. Such an approach would enhance the user experience when using the web browser. Unique user interactions, shortcuts and user interfaces can also be made available to the user to browse their user data as per the tab context or web page content. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: in section 2 we look at related work in the area of tab context. Section 3 and 4 introduce our proposed solutions of segregating user data by tabs and other context via clustering. Section 5 discusses some issues with the tabbed approach. Section 6 presents the results of some experiments to study the impact on browser performance and analyzes the results. Section 7 presents some user interfaces for viewing and manipulating the user data in the browser organized by tab and other context. Section 8 concludes the paper. Fig. 1. Representation of main flow for a browser maintaining user history data by tab context II. RELATED WORK There exist a number of related works in the area of tabbed browsing and in particular to organizing the browser data by