Compartmentalizing web browsing with Sailboat

Users of web browsers today swim in a sea of haphazardly organized tabs, bookmarks, searches and downloads. This is because browsers operate at the level of individual web pages, and rarely understand the user's high-level tasks. We propose to address this problem by compartmentalizing the web browsing experience across different tasks defined by the user. We describe Sailboat, an extension for Google Chrome that explores this idea by making user-defined tasks first-class objects in the browsing experience. In Sailboat, different tasks have their own tabs, history, bookmarks and download folders, while maintaining a unified identity across compartments. Sailboat lets the user create and switch between tasks such as "Philosophy Paper", "Summer Internships", and "Trip to China". Users can encapsulate the browsing related to a task, archive it or share it with others, and come back to it months later. Sailboat also tracks and reflects the analytics of time spent on different tasks to aid productivity. We deployed Sailboat with several users, and studied how they engaged with it. Our users report that Sailboat aids organized browsing, reduces distractions, and is easy to get used to.