What if your browser allowed only 4 open tabs at a time?
To be honest, this is a niche topic to write about, yet this is something that comes from my observations when I see people talking about and sharing that they work with multiple tabs open in their browser.
With increasing computing power, we allow our browser to have 10,15, sometimes 20 tabs to stay open. The trade-off of a slower browser over the closing of tabs and opening tabs all over again seems to be unclear, so people decide to stick with the former.
Surely, one can’t be working on 20 browser tabs at a time. Which makes me wonder if we can avoid having so many browser tabs open, say for the sake of improved computing power or to better organise our work such that we sequence them better and thus accomplish more work over time (instead of multi-tasking on many tasks which usually takes longer and sometimes dilutes the quality of work)?
What if we had a browser that would allow only a maximum of 4 tabs to remain open at a time. Let’s name this browser as Only4.
Now we have discussed the why behind a product like this. Let’s think a bit about who is going to find such a browser useful.
How they will use it?
What will be the challenges?
How will they overcome the challenges?
How will it help them do more with minimal mental fatigue (or related pitfalls of too many browser tabs)?
Would they be okay with categorisations? And how would they do that?
What would be the primary user journey for Only4?
A user wanting Only4 would be good at prioritisation and organisation/labelling of information. They probably ace at using Google Drive / any similar cloud file managers. They know how to make colours work in harmony with information.
I also feel that a power user for Only4 would be someone who doesn’t multitask and knows that it’s not their forte. So they’d use the four browser tabs to pick and close one task before moving to the next.
From a performance standpoint, Only4 would be handy and lean. It won’t use system memory much. I have noticed many of my coworkers / ex-coworkers have experienced their system crashing because of too many tabs being open. Only4 is THE solution for them.
How would Only4 change general user behaviour around web browsers? Do you think it would work just fine in today’s world?
Most importantly, would you use Only4? :)
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