Volume 11, Number 23, December 2021

Smart Tab Predictor: A Chrome Extension to Assist Browser Task Management
using Machine Learning and Data Analysis

  Authors

Brian Hu¹, Evan Gunnell² and Yu Sun², ¹USA, ²California State Polytechnic University, USA

  Abstract

The outbreak of the Covid 19 pandemic has forced most schools and businesses to use digital learning and working. Many people have repetitive web browsing activities or encounter too many open tabs causing slowness in surfing the websites. This paper presents a tab predictor application, a Chrome browser extension that uses Machine Learning (ML) to predict the next URL to open based on the time and frequency of current and previous tabs. Nowadays, AI technology has expanded in people’s daily lives like self-driving cars and assistive-type robots. The AI ML module in our application is more basic and is built using Python and Scikit-Learn (Sklearn) machine learning libraries. We use JavaScript and Chrome API to collect the browser tab data and store it in a Firebase Cloud Firestore. The ML module then loads data from the Firebase, trains datasets to adapt to a user’s patterns, and predicts URLs to recommend opening new URLs. For Machine Learning, we compare three ML models and select the Random Forest Classifier. We also apply SMOTE (Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique) to make the data-set more balanced, thus improving the prediction accuracy. Both manual tests and Cross Validation are performed to verify the predicted URLs. As a result, using the Smart Tab Predictor application will help students and business workers manage the web browser tabs more efficiently in their daily routine for online classes, online meetings, and other websites.

  Keywords

Machine Learning, Chrome extension, Task Management.