Tab-Groups
Tab-Groups copied to clipboard
Quicksaver
Shared groups across windows
I originally wrote about my issues here in this review: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-panorama/reviews/788903/
I should have added them here sorry, but had a feeling that this might have been "as designed", which is why I went with the review in the first place.
So I've got 1 window open with a bunch of tab groups, all neatly named, and organised. If I quit firefox, and go back in, everything reloads fine, no problem.
If I open a new window, and quit firefox, and go back in, everything reloads fine, no problem.
The issue arises if I open a new window, then accidentally close the window with all the groups. If I quit firefox, and go back in, all my tab groups are lost.
This is quite easy to do because its not always intuitive that 1 window has the tab-groups and other windows do not, or that each window can have a unique set of tab-groups.
You will know best what to do to avoid these kinds of issues, but here's 1 thought I had that might help; If you incorporate the concept of windows in the tab-groups selection UI, people could move tab-groups between windows if they so wanted. Also, you could de-couple tab-groups from window instances, so that in my situation, I would come back in, and I'd see my set of tab-groups not attached to any window, and I could then manually attach them, or close them at will. Let me know what you think, or if anything is unclear.
I personally put a lot of effort into the tab-groups, I name them and organise them and it helps me switch between projects easily. But the fact is that because of the windowing issues, I keep loosing my groups, and its frustrating.
You should use Session Manager, and program a auto backup for your session, even in windows it could save your groups in a set time. There's a lot of ppl talking about sharing groups between windows, this could solve your issue, or you just want a prompt that shows up when trying to close a window when more and more than one window its opened and have more than one group?
I had a look at Session Manager, and its not really what I'm after here. Yes, having all the tab-groups shared amongst windows, would probably fix the issue too.
Session manager would just prevent you from having a headache, since you could just change for another backup, and that'll open all the windows from that time, with the groups.
Indeed, that is not quite what I understood from your review, as you have probably already guessed from my response there. ;) The gist of it is, windows and sessions are different things. Sessions can have multiple windows open (and closed), and you can only run one session at a time.
Sharing groups across windows is something I already want to do, although admittedly it's not very high on my priorities list, mostly because it is not something that is easily done, it's not just a matter of sharing groups across windows, it's also sharing tabs across windows. This... is complicated, tabs just aren't built that way. (I've changed the title of the issue to better reflect my plan here.)
I also agree that Session Manager may not be the most useful tool for your case. Although it's easy to get around the issue only with Firefox. When you close a window but still have another one open, you can get it back by clicking the History button (by default it's in the menu panel, the one that opens when you click the three bars / hamburger button at the top right). If there are any closed windows in your current session, they will appear in a "Recently closed windows" section in there.
If you're still running the same session as when you lost your groups (when you first wrote the review), you may even still be able to get back the groups you lost then.
Welp, I guess session manager is just too dependable.
Even in this aspect, I dont remember if FF recover the closed windows in history, if he already closed FF and opened it again.
EDIT: Nevermind, does this issue even exist? I tried opening 2 FF window, the 2 with groups and tabs, and closing one, then quitting in another, when I started FF again, it OPENED THE 2 window perfectly fine, with tabs and groups. And I have just tab groups in that one profile.
Welp, I guess session manager is just too dependable.
I'd be surprised if the leading session manager add-on didn't keep track of closed windows. ;)
Even in this aspect, I dont remember if FF recover the closed windows in history, if he already closed FF and opened it again.
It does. At one point I had a few closed windows in my developer profile from so long before that I didn't even remember what their purpose was. They may still be cleaned after some time, although I don't have the specifics on that. But that's why I said it may be possible. :)
I tried opening 2 FF window, the 2 with groups and tabs, and closing one, then quitting in another, when I started FF again, it OPENED THE 2 window perfectly fine, with tabs and groups. And I have just tab groups in that one profile.
You may just not have given it enough time to record the new session data to disk; this doesn't happen immediately on every change as to spare the disk from unnecessary heavy read-write cycles. Or it may be that Session Manager handles this aspect a little differently than native Firefox's session handler.
In the profile for the test, I just installed tab groups, and FF should save the session to disk in a proper quit. Anyway the issue it's just a bit irrelevant, if FF does it in a native way.
Thanks, the Show Recently Closed Windows is exactly the kind of workaround I needed. As far as I can tell, there's no issue then, and this is more of a feature request that I think would make this plugin even more awesome than it already is :) Keep up the good work guys, the fact that Firefox removed this behavior is beyond me, but I reckon this is a good opportunity to improve some of the reasons why I think it (the functionality) failed to gain popularity in the first place.
@skela since this isn't actually a bug and everything is working as expected, especially since you can get back the closed windows, could I ask you to update your review and rating? :)
@Quicksaver sure I've updated it, gave it 4 stars , will give it 5 when Shared groups across windows is completed 👍
Not to sound discouraging, but that's a somewhat unrealistic expectation. It may not be possible to do something like that at all. As I said, tabs themselves just aren't built that way. I will definitely work on this (sometime) but if it turns out it requires some heavy rewrites on Firefox's own mechanisms that handle tabs, I probably won't implement it as it would mean far too many changes for honestly not that big of a gain.
I think this may be describing my issue also. Tab groups need to be global to my entire firefox session. I use session manager and it saves all tables. Tab Groups needs to save all groups. I need to be able to see all groups from any window. I need to be able to switch groups in a window. I also need to be able to open a group in a new windows giving me two windows each with a separate group.
I have been trying to use the bookmarks tool bar for this with different folders, but it is way to awkward. One of the difficulties that I also hope Tab Groups can address is selecting a subset of all my open tabs for a window and moving them to a group. I often don't know that I want to save the tabs until I have quite a few open and mixed with tabs I don't want to save.
BTW, I think this could be the killer add-on that keeps Firefox at the top of the browser list, if it could incorporate tab groups, session management with crash protection, and deactivating non-active tabs, or at least non-active groups. Thanks for the hard work!
Just a +1 on this. I don't really understand Firefox' handling of new windows anyway, but it would be great to share groups across them (as if a new window was just an independently displayed tab)
Another possible aspect/feature/preliminary fix to this would be facilitating moving tab groups between windows.
Really, all I want right now is to move the group from my second window into the first and go back to one window. I'm not by any means familiar with FF internals, but maybe it's possible to make use of the existing mechanism that FF uses to move tabs between windows to get around the fact that tabs cannot be "shared" by windows.
I'll throw another "yes please" in here. This would be really helpful for multi-monitor setups.
