When the Tab Comes Due: Challenges in the Cost Structure of Browser Tab Usage Joseph Chee Chang Nathan Hahn Yongsung Kim [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA Julina Coupland Bradley Breneisen Hannah S Kim [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA John Hwong Aniket Kittur [email protected] [email protected] Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA ABSTRACT Tab Comes Due: Challenges in the Cost Structure of Browser Tab Usage. Tabs have become integral to browsing the Web yet have changed In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’21), May ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 pages. https: little since their introduction nearly 20 years ago. In contrast, the 8–13, 2021, Yokohama, Japan. //doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445585 internet has gone through dramatic changes, with users increas- ingly moving from navigating to websites to exploring information across many sources to support online sensemaking. This paper 1 INTRODUCTION investigates how tabs today are overloaded with a diverse set of Tabs have become an integral part of how people browse and nav- functionalities and issues users face when managing them. We igate the Web since they were introduced in the early 2000s, and interviewed ten information workers asking about their tab man- they are now a ubiquitous feature in all major web browsers. As agement strategies and walk through each open tab on their work the Web becomes all-encompassing with complex applications and computers four times over two weeks. We uncovered competing rich information, browser tabs have also become the portals for pressures pushing for keeping tabs open (ranging from interaction how people access information and make sense of the world today. to emotional costs) versus pushing for closing them (such as lim- People open browser tabs to check email inboxes, control music and ited attention and resources). We then surveyed 103 participants video players, stash articles to read later, chat with friends, organize to estimate the frequencies of these pressures at scale. Finally, we reviews and articles to plan trips, compare products, and research to developed design implications for future browser interfaces that write articles. However, while the Web has gone through dramatic can better support managing these pressures. changes in size, complexity, and usage, tabbed browsing interfaces CCS CONCEPTS remain largely the same. Tabs continue to be instantiated as simple temporally-ordered lists of independent pages with limited contex- • Human-centered computing ! User models; Empirical stud- tual cues and opportunities for manipulation. Indeed, the fixation ies in HCI; • Information systems ! Browsers. on tabs as a metaphor is so strong that the most popular changes to using tabs involve relatively small design adjustments, such as KEYWORDS making them a vertical instead of horizontal list [18, 25], building world wide web, user behavior, browser interfaces, tabbed browsing, tabs of tabs [65], or saving sets of tabs as archived sessions [19]. In interviews, survey summary, there appears to be a disconnect between the increasing ACM Reference Format: scope and complexity of users’ online activities, and the design of Joseph Chee Chang, Nathan Hahn, Yongsung Kim, Julina Coupland, Bradley tabbed browsing that we aim to explore in this paper. Breneisen, Hannah S Kim, John Hwong, and Aniket Kittur. 2021. When the As a result of this disconnect, recent anecdotal and empirical evidence suggests that tabbed browser interfaces now engender Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or significant challenges, popularly referred to as “tab overload”28 [ – classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed 30, 50, 57, 58]. This includes difficulty in re-finding specific tabs, for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. uncertainty in whether to keep open or to close tabs, being con- For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). stantly distracted, harming productivity, causing feelings of stress CHI ’21, May 8–13, 2021, Yokohama, Japan and clutter, and, in extreme cases, causing users’ browsers or com- © 2021 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-8096-6/21/05. puters to slow or crash. Most recently, empirical evidence from a https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445585 survey conducted in 2019 showed that around half (50.7%, N=75) of CHI ’21, May 8–13, 2021, Yokohama, Japan Chang et al. their participants considered tab clutter a problem [44]. Building on their tabs, ranging from limited attention to limited browser re- this, we conducted a preliminary survey to collect more empirical sources to self-presentation. At the same time, we found a diverse evidence about tab clutter (N=64, Age: 19-67; M=33.7; SD=10.6; set of reasons why it was not easy to close open tabs. These con- 57% male; 77% from the US). Based on self-reporting, 59% of our firmed previously reported drivers observed a decade ago, such participants agreed that if they went through their browser tabs at as reminding users of unfinished tasks15 [ ], but also new factors the time when the survey took place, they would find some that relating to the cost structure of tabbed browsing, such as the cost should be closed. At the same time, only 19% agreed that laziness of re-accessing pages, the sunk costs of finding and organizing contributed to not closing them in the first place, and more than information, the benefits of supporting an (unrealistic) aspirational half (55%) of the participants agreed that they feel like they can’t self, and the uncertainty of the expected value of information in the let go of their tabs. These results suggest that there are alternative future. These pressures to close vs. keep open tabs interact to create factors to a simplistic laziness explanation causing users to keep feelings of stress, being overwhelmed, and even shamefulness in tabs open even though they were no longer useful and potentially our participants. Finally, based on our user model we conducted causing adverse effects. For example, we found that having too exploratory interviews with additional participants, probing poten- many tabs opened can harm productivity with 28% of participants tial solutions to develop a generative framework for future browser (N=64) agreeing that they often struggle with finding tabs they interfaces that can better support the underlying drivers behind needed in their browser, and 25% of the participants reported that current tabbed browsing behaviors. they had experienced browsers or computers crashing from having too many browser tabs. Finally, 30% of our participants agreed that they “have a tab hoarding problem,” echoing a common sentiment 2 RELATED WORK found more generally in digital file preservation [71]. Given that tabs are now ubiquitous to nearly all Web browsing, these num- 2.1 Managing and Revisiting Documents bers potentially translate to very large segments of the general Assisting users in organizing and accessing multiple digital docu- population. ments has long been studied across different domains since before Despite the mounting evidence that the original browser tab tabbed browsing of Web documents gained wide popularity. Specif- paradigm is not well supporting a significant segment of users today ically, early research in the 1990s explored interfaces that can help in their online activities, there has been surprisingly little work users to save webpages as a collection of bookmarks and orga- on either understanding the causes or developing novel paradigms nize them. This was motivated by research that showed people for evolving or replacing tabs. The most recent in-depth study on frequently (up to 60% of all page loads according to [64]) revisited tabbed browsing behavior was conducted a decade ago by Dubroy et the same URLs, and characterized the Web in the 90s as a “recurrent al. with Firefox users [15]. Yet at the time browsers that supported system” [64]. One major thread of research explored interfaces that tabbed browsing only accounted for around 50% of the market allowed users to organize bookmarks in 3D workspaces, such as share [72]. Further, their primary focus was to understand the WebBook [5] and DataMountain [59]. They found that by exploiting growing popularity of tabbed browsing and its benefits compared to users’ spatial memory, users were able to navigate to specific docu- only using multiple browser windows [15]. Other papers exploring ments efficiently. Similar concepts were also explored in the context tab usage have similarly examined why tabs are used in place of programming environments in the 2010s with “canvas-based edi- of previous interaction paradigms, such as the back button [15, tors” [34] that allowed developers to arrange multiple program files 37, 38]. We believe a better understanding of the limitations of and code snippets on 2D canvases for cross-referencing [4, 13, 34]. tabbed browsing today could spur novel interaction paradigms that At a high level, the primary goal of these systems was to allow users could better support the modern Web. In this paper, we set out to to efficiently re-find specific documents within a familiar collection provide an updated understanding on tabbed browsing behavior (i.e., collected bookmarks or existing codebases). by characterizing the set of functions that tabs currently serve, Conversely, a user’s collection of browser tabs can be more often sub-optimally.