Solved

Monitoring number of open app tabs with Heap

  • 25 February 2022
  • 4 replies
  • 136 views

Userlevel 3
Badge +2

Is anyone aware of a way to report on how the average number of tabs users have open at the same time? Tabs of our product of course - not all tabs.

icon

Best answer by jonathan 24 March 2022, 02:05

View original

4 replies

Userlevel 1

Hi Marcel - sorry in advance, I do not have the answer to your question, but I was hoping to understand what are you looking to learn from the number of tabs ?

Userlevel 5
Badge +3

@marsan I’m afraid this isn’t possible. There are APIs which provide an interface for Browser Extensions to get limited access to browser data like this. But they are not accessible to page-level JavaScript, are limited in scope, and require end-user authorization.

The main reason is it that knowing what other tabs are open, which urls are being visited, etc, would present a significant privacy and security risk, potentially opening users up to malicious scripting attacks.

Hope this helps!

Userlevel 3
Badge +2

Hi @Noa basically we’re trying to get an understanding of what things users are doing simultaneously within our product so we can identify opportunities for convergence of workflows to simplify the user experience. Any sort of tab level metric/grouping would be great for example in the funnel analysis so we can do a more targeted analysis of what happens between two events in the same tab. Right now the funnel analysis adds any events and although sometimes that can be useful in other cases it does add noise.

Userlevel 2
Badge

Just brainstorming here, but is there anything that could be done along the lines of:
 

  1. Some code in your product sets a new ‘ID’ variable on page load (and keeps that same variable for a given tab).
  2. You send that off to Heap as an Event-level Property, labelling it as something like “Tab ID”.
  3. You can then do a calculation of unique Users ÷ unique Tab IDs.

 

Not sure that’s feasible, but just throwing it out there!

Reply