The Important Difference Between Sessions and the Global Tabs
When users first fire up Ghost Browser, the first thing most people do is right-click a tab and open a ‘New Session’.
The result might be something like the image below.
The gray tabs represent the Global Tabs (like tabs in a normal browser) and the purple tab is of course a Ghost Browser Session tab. From now on we’ll call them Global tabs and Sessions.
In the Global tabs, I’m logged into my personal Gmail account, my LinkedIn account and my personal Twitter account.
Because of Ghost Browser’s special Session handling feature, in the purple Session, I can also be logged into the Ghost Browser Twitter account.
So, with this setup, it’s easy to explain the unique feature of the Global tabs. Global tabs use a cookie jar that are not just global to that one Workspace, but to your whole Ghost Browser experience.
In other words. If I were to open up a new Workspace, and go to Gmail and Twitter in a Global tab, I would be logged into my personal accounts automatically. Why? Because the Global tabs are Global in every Workspace. They share cookies across the whole browser.
But, if, in the second Workspace, I were to open up a purple Session and go to Twitter, I would not be logged in to any Twitter account there. Because Sessions have a cookie jar that is isolated to the current Workspace only. And of course all Sessions are isolated from each other. So the purple Session is isolated from the green, orange and blue Sessions as seen in the screen shot below.
How to Use The Global Tabs Effectively
There are many ways to take advantage of this special characteristic of Global tabs. The best of which might be to not use them – depending on your use case. Let me explain.
If you are managing social media accounts, as in the example above, it might be better for you to not use Global tabs for any of them. Use it for general web browsing, but keep your social media accounts that you want to isolate from one another in the colored Sessions. Otherwise, when you switch Workspace, you might be logged in to an account without realizing it. Posting from the wrong account is never fun.
Global tabs can be used in cases where you do want consistency across Workspace. Lets say you manage Google accounts (Google My Business listings or Gmail accounts, for example) for your clients. If you keep each client’s work in different colored Sessions, you can still have your own email one click away by logging into your accounts in the Global tabs. This is also good for tools like Trello, where you would have all of your boards under one account and switching is easy.
The difference between the Global tabs and Sessions is very small but that nuance can have a great effect on your productivity if you use it consciously.