Any projects like this already, or a repo?
Technically, chrome already encode information like this, I too put it down as a future project to try and parse it.
Ultimately, this info provides context, and things like e.g tab lineage (which tabs are related) and grouping can be derived from history.
Re:Lossless Web Navigation with Trails
by dorian-graph on Wednesday February 01, 2017 @09:03AM
(#13540741)
Not that I know of aside from this what this blog post describes, and the couple of prior work it lists.
Where/how does chrome encode the information? Depending on what's available and how accessible it is, I might be keen to start looking into it.
Why is back/forward history helpful on a single tab? (I leave this as an exercise for the reader) That reasoning more or less applies to cross-tab history/state. Previous behaviour was that people contained most of their browsing to a single tab (because browsers didn't have tabs, or they weren't commonly used). Behaviour has changed now to be more cross-tab.