Time spent in each group?

[digital-carver]

trafficstars

Hi,

Is there a way to find out the time spent in each group, in the last 24 hours, in the last month, etc.?

I have my tabs split into groups such as Work Projects, Social media, e-Shopping, etc. Having the times spent in each group would be useful in analyzing how much time is spent in each of these activities. Even if it's not available as part of the UI (as it doesn't seem to be), just being able to extract that info from somewhere in the Profiles folder would be useful in creating a script to read and present this info.

[Quicksaver]

This kind of info isn't tracked anywhere, so it's not possible to do it at all at the moment. It's an interesting concept though. Is there any add-on that does this per-tab? Simple extrapolation (adding up tab times in each group) should be doable then.

[digital-carver]

Thanks for the quick reply!

I wasn't able to find any add-on that specifically tracks per-tab time, but LeechBlock tracks time by matching the full URL against a pattern, thus is capable of tracking time spent on a particular page (by letting the "pattern" be https://github.com/Quicksaver/Tab-Groups/issues/422 for eg.) as implied by this FAQ answer. I don't know if that's significantly different from tab-level tracking at the code level.

It's not clear whether Firefox Internet Dashboard and Mind the Time track per-page time or only per-domain. (And Mind the Time's time-tracking code was apparently taken from LeechBlock's, and "reworked".)

Then there's a whole bunch of (mostly old) addons which claim to "track time spent on different websites", where again it's not clear whether they're necessarily restricted to domain-level tracking or can do page-level as well: PageAddict, Usage Counter, wasted-time-calculator, FireTrack .

There's also Time Signal, which seems limited to overall browser level tracking, but I include it because it tries to detect whether you are "actively using your browser" or "inactive", which might also be a useful feature to have.

[Quicksaver]

Thanks for the awesome research!

Tracking per-page or per-domain is of course sub-optimal. You can easily have two similar pages in different groups and that will shift the results significantly.

I'll be sure to take a look at those add-ons eventually, as I do think it's an interesting concept, but I should note this won't happen any time soon, there's just so much to be done before I ever get to add features such as this.

[Spitfire1900]

This feels out of scope of this add-on.

[digital-carver]

@Spitfire1900 I might end up agreeing with you, if the code ends up being of even moderate complexity. I originally envisioned this as just a cool bit of easily-obtained stats, mildly interesting to most users but very useful to folks like me. If the implementation complexity turns out non-trivial, it might perhaps be better off as a separate tool - a different Fx addon that depends on this one, or even an external script.

@Quicksaver On that topic, could you point me to the places where the potentially relevant data would be available to other tools: the names of all tab groups, what the current one is, perhaps a log of user interactions with the addon (when they switch groups, create a new group, etc.) if available, any other data that you think might be useful.

[Quicksaver]

There's no such log. As for the rest, you it's all done in the TabVIew frame, just look for things like getActive and related methods and see how those change. There's really no "one" place where this all is.

[ooker777]

This can work if you put the tab group name on the title, like the Panorama Tab Group Name addon. You can use a time tracking program like ManicTime (Windows & Mac) to track the time spent on a tab group.