For about a year I have been privately using a Chrome Extension that I designed and I’ve recently released it to the public.
How Duplicate Tab Helper Works
Prevents duplicate tabs effortlessly.
Duplicate Tab Helper prevents the opening of duplicate URLs at the moment new tabs are opened. If a duplicate is found, the newer tab will be replaced with the existing tab as seamlessly as possible. The effect is so subtle you may not even notice it happening.
One of the design choices I had to make regarding resolving duplicates was to decide if you should keep either the new tab or the one that is already open. I opted to keep the older tab for a few reasons:
- The older tab may have form data filled out. I don’t want to discard this information or user sadness may result.
- The older tab may have a scroll position where the user has already scrolled to and is still reading.
- The older tab already has the page loaded. This quietly enhances your browsing speed.
If you try to open a duplicate tab, the new one disappears and the old tab slides into position where you want it. This behavior is FANTASTIC for research that favors opening many URLs into new tabs. The user can open as many tabs as they want, or open links more than once to be certain, and any duplicates will instantly vanish as soon as they are detected. Furthermore, from a usability standpoint, when a URL has been newly requested, the user likely anticipates for that information to be available where the new tab is created, so that is where the old tab gets shifted to. The user always feels like the information they wanted is more readily at their fingertips and this feels very natural.
The bottom line is this makes Chrome work precisely how it should have worked out of the box.
Link
If this link is ever to be broken, you can likely search for “Duplicate Tab Helper” on the Chrome Web Store where new Extensions can be found.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/duplicate-tab-helper/oaceoebbkmkgfjhmngdinoclnionlgoh
As a web developer, Visual Studio always opens up a new tab every time I launch my app. It would be great if it could keep the new tab with the fresh page and close the old tab with the old version of the page. This is obviously a different use case than originally intended, but one for which this extension could be equally useful.
Why choose for the user what behavior it has when it is simple enough to create a setting that lets the user pick what the preferred behavior should be.
Big thanks for your support.
If you get a chance, toss me the URL that Visual Studio opens for you. I’d like to gain some insight as to how I might implement this. This is a “user story” I’d like to consider for a future version if I can get it right.