Existing plugins focus on their areas of operation - e.g. Browser Bookmarks on bookmarks only, Browser Tabs on tabs only.
Why not join these two worlds to create synergy?
Especially if one works with tens or hundreds of bookmarks and open tabs (I do and I constantly struggle finding the correct tab. It is underestimated mental cost of finding, clicking several times, etc.).
That's where "Reuse tabs" setting in Browser Bookmarks plugin makes sense.
I believe it is in line with why Flow Launcher was created in the first place.
I strongly believe in a higher level concept of "just take me to THIS place - as fast as possible, as easy as possible".
Thus making bridges between plugins may sometimes produce huge value! BTW wouldn't it be nice to allow inter-plugin communication to create this kind of "bridges" more easily?
The core is Browser Bookmarks plugin, unchanged by default.
You may enable "Reuse tabs" in the plugin settings.
Then, whenever one opens a bookmark, it also registers a new tab in its cache.
Next, each time the bookmark is triggered again, it just switches to the existing tab instead of launching a new one.
It takes milliseconds instead of long seconds (or sometimes close to half a minute in corporate environments where all is slow even if you have a high end laptop - you won't believe it until you live it!).
The extension bases on RuntimeId of AutomationElement from Microsoft UI Automation.
This is a weak spot as browsers are used to regenerate internal structures and even reuse RuntimeId.
It rarely happens that a bookmark activates a wrong tab.
Still "just take me to THIS place in milliseconds" works almost all of the time so it bring so much value that it is worthwhile to accepts the fact it fails sometimes.
The quickest workaround is:
- close the wrong tab
- rerun opening the bookmark which will create a new tab this time
Reading URLs of existing tabs was tried. It would make mapping of bookmarks to tabs more reliable.
However due to security reasons it has several limitations:
- different browsers exposes internals differently
- it is not easily accessible (e.g. you cannot make Chrome expose internal details on a dev TCP port from default profile so user would have to take care about special settings).
"Reuse tabs" setting was created initially by Andrzej Martyna