mbnuqw
Persist Tabs Between Windows when using Groups
Description
Hey! I was recommended to use SideBery since I am transitioning out of Arc for Windows, and I was told this creates the same experience. So far I like the general idea of sidebery, but there is something that is missing that I think would make the general usability much greater.
Right now opening a new window creates a window with the same groups, but without persisting the tabs. I'd appreciate the tab persistence, so that you can essentially just have several groups of tabs in every window, rather than one window overloaded with tabs.
Even if this means you can't have a group open in two windows at once (which wouldn't make a ton of sense to do anyway), the lack of persistence is a usability issue for me, and likely more than just me.
came here to suggest the same thing! as impressed as i am with how customizable sidebery is, this lack of persistence as you mention defeats the whole purpose for me. tab stash, for example, shows all your saved groups and tabs whenever you open the sidebar, though the use case for that extension is slightly different. the ability to save multiple separate windows in a tab group would be a welcome addition as well.
came here to suggest the same thing! as impressed as i am with how customizable sidebery is, this lack of persistence as you mention defeats the whole purpose for me. tab stash, for example, shows all your saved groups and tabs whenever you open the sidebar, though the use case for that extension is slightly different. the ability to save multiple separate windows in a tab group would be a welcome addition as well.
I've been using Vivaldi as my daily driver since opening this issue since they have the tab persistence natively in the browser, albeit not across devices like Arc does. Might be a good alternative for you while waiting for Sidebery to add this functionality!
I'm highly skeptical this is even possible at all in Mozilla Firefox? Within the SAME Firefox PROFILE.
As far as I know, with each Firefox window you open, it gets a new "session ID". So, there is now way for an extension to know which tab sets belong to which opened window. Especially because new windows don't re-use old session ID's.
The mere fact that Firefox itself doesn't know what tabs were open in a new (secondary) window, kind of says it all, doesn't it? To me that says: Firefox doesn't keep track of window sessions, and simply create a new one with every FF window you open. Therefor it is entirely impossible to keep track of window sessions vs tab sets, because Firefox wasn't built from the ground up to do that.
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POSSIBLE, BUT ONLY PARTLY, "SOLUTION" FOR YOUR PROBLEM The ONLY way that this is going to work (by default, without any modifications required in Sidebery), is if you use DIFFERENT FIREFOX PROFILES for all of your Firefox tab sets. Each different profile keeps track of the last used session, so with that you can have multiple Firefox windows open, as long as they are also separate FF profiles, and have FF load the last known Sidebery tab set.
However, Add-ons, Bookmarks and other settings are NOT shared between different FF profiles. so, you would need to set up each and every profile separately. And that may be more than you want to deal with...
Of course, you can also install multiple instances of Firefox in different locations, and use those to start a specific profile. But the same limitations apply as with the use of different profiles in one Firefox instance. It just makes it a little bit easier to start the different profiles, because you won't need o start "Firefox -p" and choose a different profile, but instead just make shortcuts for the different Firefox installations.
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FINAL THOUGHTS Anyway, in Firefox, there is no easy solution to managing multiple windows with their own tab sets. Sidebery itself has nothing to with that, and simply cannot bind tab sets to specific started Firefox instances, because there are no coding provisions within Firefox for something like that.
Then again, I may be wrong about all of this, as I am not an expert in Firefox coding 😉
As for me personally, I consistently and persistently have around 5000 tabs open, all neatly organized in (vertical) Panels and Groups. I basically used them as I would folders in the Windows Explorer. Panels are the Drives, and Groups are the Folders. I really have no need for session persistence across multiple windows.
All my tabs sit in one Firefox profile/session, and it works great, without any memory usage issues at all. Memory usage sits usually at around 8GG (I have a total of 48GB in this particular PC), with quite a few tabs LOADED. I do proactively manage my tabs by UNLOADING the ones I do not need for longer periods of time.
I also leave Firefox running for months on end, with my PC going to sleep only. So, the Firefox sessions normally doesn't end for very long periods of time, unless certain updates/installations require a restart, but still memory usage isn't an issue.
I am quite happy with the way things are currently.
Adding my voice to this request, though I think it's a dupe of #659. It would be less bad than the current state if there was an option so that panels were not shared between windows. The way I naturally use tab grouping is like a folder or workspace, but the way panels are currently implemented is more like a tag (but a window-specific tag). It means that I end up with a bunch of empty panels in every window that I'll probably never add anything to because it would break the core usefulness of being able to organize tabs in groups by having disjoint tabs that are meant to be grouped with the rest.
@JohnVKRDam it's definitely possible, the Simple Tab Groups extension implements this functionality (though it unfortunately seems to have issues on the most recent versions of Firefox).
