Tab groups break when browser is shut down and restarted.

[GWHAYWOOD]

This is a follow-up from #197, mostly for information in case it helps understand how things work (or break). Until now it was not clear to me that there might be two separate issues described by #197, the two issues being

(1) tabs being lost from groups and

(2) tab groups being mangled even if the tabs themselves are not lost.

The system itself, to recap, is a 4GByte Intel i7 laptop running
Palemoon 29.4.2.1 (64-bit) on
Debian Buster (10.11) and
TabKit2 was installed from
tabkit2_0.14.0-2021-11-10-114758.xpi on 10th November 2021.

The only active browser extensions are
Session Manager 0.8.1.14 and
uBlock Origin 1.16.4.30.
There is one disabled extension
Tab Groups Manager Reloaded 1.0.1 and
and one disabled plugin
Adobe Flash - Shockwave Flash 11.2 r202.
No other extensions or plugins are installed.

As per #197, for a long time (months) when the browser was shut down and then restarted, not only would some tabs be lost, but also some groups would break into pieces - as well at perhaps losing some of their tabs.

Since finding these problems, in an attempt to gather more information I have been shutting down the browser at the end of each working day and restarting it at the beginning of the next day. I would take a screenshot of the tab groups at browser shutdown and another at restart for comparison. The computer itself is not normally shut down, as amongst other things it runs nightly backups. It is normally only shut down for OS upgrades etc.

Tabs do not seem to be getting lost now (#197) but groups still break into pieces on browser restart. When this happens, the pieces may be single ungrouped tabs or they may be smaller groups of a few tabs. I do not see any pattern to the new groupings, but they always seem to appear adjacent to each other in the tab list, and I believe that at startup the tabs in the new groups always appear in the same order in which they were when they were in a single group at shutdown.

In an attempt to prevent groups from breaking, gradually over a period of weeks I have moved groups from window to window and finally a couple of days ago I moved the last tab group which was reliably breaking on browser restart to a window of its own. To avoid falling foul of #211 the method I used to move the group was
(1) ungroup the group using the TabKit2 menu option,
(2) move the first tab to a new window using the appropriate browser menu option,
(3) move the remaining tabs individually to the new window by drag-and-drop with the mouse, and finally
(4) group the tabs into a single group in the new window using the TabKit2 menu option.

For a couple of days now this group, which had been problematic for some time, now appears in a single group when the browser restarts.

Unfortunately I now have six browser windows running, which is more than I would like, so I will try to move tabs from two of the windows to the other four in the hope that they will continue to behave themselves.

When I have done that I will report what I find here.

Note that the protection on some tab groups still appears to be unreliable on a browser restart, but it seems to be much more reliable on the newly moved groups.

[PikachuEXE]

Again I think this might be session store persistence issue (#83)
Which might be fixed by loading all tabs (with issue), ungroup and regroup (to guarantee a new GroupID assigned)

the protection on some tab groups

Tab protection is also implemented by an attribute on tabs (like group ID and tab ID)
So the fix might be the same (load tabs, unprotect and protect)

[GWHAYWOOD]

Hi, it's been a while. That's good!

Another data point which might help shed some light.

I've been avoiding this issue simply by (1) using something which saves tabs between browser sessions and (2) only very infrequently shutting down the browser - I bought a computer with a lot more memory, and now sometimes I run the browser for months without restarting it. Life is good.

Today I decided to move some tabs from one window to another. I normally run six windows, each for different parts of my work, each will have between twenty and a couple of hundred tabs.

Each window is on a different desktop. There are 80 desktops, again different aspects of my work. Only one desktop is visible on the screen at any one time. It's easy to move browser windows from one desktop to another, and there can be more than one browser window on a desktop but I normally have only one because I find it easier to work that way.

On one desktop (let's call it 2.1.4) which contains (let's call it) window 4, I opened new window - call it window 7. My plan was to use window 7 to move a group of tabs from window 4 to window 3 (which is on desktop 2.1.3). So window 7 is only to be a temporary store, or a kind of wheelbarrow.

Working on desktop 2.1.4 I planned to move the tabs from window 4 to window 7 using drag and drop, then move window 7 with all these tabs to desktop 2.1.3 (which contains window 3), then move the tabs in window 7 to window 3, then close window 7.

I moved a single tab from a tab group in the existing window 4 to the new window 7.

Immediately, all hell broke loose in the tab groupings in the 'from' window. Groupings broke, many tabs disappeared, and little '+' icons appeared at the left of long lists of tabs which had no business being there.

I guess I won't do things this way again, and I can manage without doing what I tried to do.

HTH

Cheers,
Ged.