> Tab Groups were better when they were baked into the browser. They were extremely buggy when the code was removed and moved into an extension. Not only often losing all of my tabs - but completely forgetting all of my tab groups altogether. Causing me to lose not only important data but also having to re-organize all my tabs into tab groups only to inevitably have to redo all the work next time FF decided it wanted to crash (which was multiple times a day at that point due to the extension...). It happened with such regularity that I grew sick of it and it was the single motivating factor that pushed me to use Chrome as my default browser.
This hasn't happened to me -- my biggest issues have been around mistakenly clicking into a browser group in a second browser window.
Since I have two browsers open, I keep one for sort of ephemeral stuff which isn't on a browser group at all, then main stuff (email, slack, etc) on the one. Note that pinned tabs also work fine -- I have a pinned tab that's not in a container at all (my personal email) and it's fine across all groups.
If it helps, the extension now takes copious backups across browser upgradest at the very least (that I have to delete from time to time), files named `STF-backups-FF-<FF version>`.
> I can only hope/assume they've gotten better since then - but it burned me really, really bad. So much that it still pisses me off talking about it all these years later.
> Two of the original features that were extremely buggy were a hotkey to open up a visual overview of tab groups (originally Ctrl+Shift+E) and a way to search for a tab and reduce the number of visible tab groups to only groups containing a tab matching that search.
Sorry to hear that... I have to say that I don't use the hotkeys that much -- I don't use a visual over view, I just go up to the add on, click it, switch into the workspace and usually I'm there for an 1-4 hours.
Maybe you could look through the release notes? I don't know what the version you used last was, but I defnitely haven't lost tabs or been very frustrated with STG in a long time.
The color coding is fantastic. I have most groups linked to a container profile, all new tabs open in the profile and everything is tidy, separate, and color coded.
I can definitely vouch that it's more stable these days -- I am daily driving it and haven't thought about it in what has to be months to years. It's a crucial part of my workflow -- I use it to seriously separate work that I do for various projects (of course I have to re-login to Github, Gitlab, etc).
Thank you for taking the time to respond back to me - I honestly appreciate it.
The release notes honestly weren't all that helpful - but looking over the Git repo, it looks like a lot of the major crashing/session restoration bugs were squashed in 2020-2021 and the backup functionality was improved enough to make backups more user friendly and somewhat more automated (aka: worth using and not 4 days out of date). There are still some flaws but those flaws come from the extension suffering the limitations of being a web extension - which is a tangentially related but another huge gripe of mine.
Now if only I could find a way to restore my context-menu tab switching - a feature lost when FireGestures was killed off. I didn't use any of the other gesture functionality at all - I only used the "[Popup] List All Tabs" feature which worked great with tab groups back in the day. (See: "Wheel Gestures" http://www.xuldev.org/firegestures/features.php)
E: (moments before I was about to post...)
Holy. Shit. Gesturefy recreated that functionality - and around the time I had given up on FF too. Back to Firefox I go! I had tried Foxy Gestures thinking it was the successor to FireGestures but I never gave Gesturefy a chance back then. In case I was bad at describing it, you can test it out yourself after setting it up in the settings: "[Popup] All Tabs" as a wheel gesture - it is an absolute game changer and I am SO GLAD I can go back to my circa-2013~2016 workflow after all these years. Only downside is continuing to scroll doesn't highlight tabs to change - so a small step back - wonder if it is even possible with how WE's are limited.
Glad to hear you were able to at least find some remnants of the issues (and that they were solved!).
The hobbling of web extensions seems only set to continue but really glad that super useful stuff can still be done with them (and hopefully that continues, or the browser fracturing intensifies).
This hasn't happened to me -- my biggest issues have been around mistakenly clicking into a browser group in a second browser window.
Since I have two browsers open, I keep one for sort of ephemeral stuff which isn't on a browser group at all, then main stuff (email, slack, etc) on the one. Note that pinned tabs also work fine -- I have a pinned tab that's not in a container at all (my personal email) and it's fine across all groups.
If it helps, the extension now takes copious backups across browser upgradest at the very least (that I have to delete from time to time), files named `STF-backups-FF-<FF version>`.
> I can only hope/assume they've gotten better since then - but it burned me really, really bad. So much that it still pisses me off talking about it all these years later.
> Two of the original features that were extremely buggy were a hotkey to open up a visual overview of tab groups (originally Ctrl+Shift+E) and a way to search for a tab and reduce the number of visible tab groups to only groups containing a tab matching that search.
Sorry to hear that... I have to say that I don't use the hotkeys that much -- I don't use a visual over view, I just go up to the add on, click it, switch into the workspace and usually I'm there for an 1-4 hours.
Maybe you could look through the release notes? I don't know what the version you used last was, but I defnitely haven't lost tabs or been very frustrated with STG in a long time.
The color coding is fantastic. I have most groups linked to a container profile, all new tabs open in the profile and everything is tidy, separate, and color coded.
I can definitely vouch that it's more stable these days -- I am daily driving it and haven't thought about it in what has to be months to years. It's a crucial part of my workflow -- I use it to seriously separate work that I do for various projects (of course I have to re-login to Github, Gitlab, etc).