Simple-tab-groups: STG destroys tabs in groups, changing them to "new tab" when the group is picked

Created on 26 Apr 2019 · 38Comments · Source: Drive4ik/simple-tab-groups

Describe the bug

I suspected STG was destroying tabs in my groups, changing them to "new tab" at some stage and causing me to lose state, because I saw lots of "new tab" in there, and in the Firefox hidden tabs menu. But I wasn't sure if it was adding more or creating them. Now I know it's destroying them: I looked in a group with 9 tabs inside the STG popup menu, and it clearly showed their titles and favicons. Then I switched to that group. The 9 tabs appeared, 8 of them had changed to "new tab" and only the foreground tab was correct.

This is obviously quite a serious problem.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

Look in STG popup menu at groups.
Click the right arrow of a group, see inside group titles and favicons of treasured tabs.
Go back, bring up popup menu again, select the group to switch to it.
See that most of the tabs visible in the tab bar are now "New Tab".
Click on some, confirm they are new tabs and don't have a URL or history.
Bring up STG popup menu, click right arrow of the group, see inside that group titles have been replaced by "New Tab".
Curiously, the original favicons of the tabs are kept, in the STG group tab list, only the title has changed to "New Tab".

Expected behavior
Tabs in groups should never lose their state irreversibly just by foregrounding them like this.

Desktop (please complete the following information):

OS is Mac OSX 10.9 (Mavericks)
Firefox is 67.0b14 (beta channel at the time of writing)
STG version is 3.4.4, updated 26 April 2019

Additional context
I didn't have any other add-ons enabled, at the time of the test with 9 tabs in a group described above.

Source

jlokier

👍1

All 38 comments

I've discovered STG might not be destroying tabs when picking a tab group to show it - instead it is creating lots of "New tab" tabs in a strange way, and storing those inside the group, moving the correct tabs (which are hidden) into a different group than the one selected!

I found this by using the add-on Export Tab URLs to get a snapshot of all tab URLs before and after picking an STG group, and I found that none of the URLs actually disappeared. Instead, the correct tabs remained hidden.

It's even a bit stranger. On picking a group of about 17 tabs, STG opened 16 "New tab" tabs that are not the active tab, and 1 tab which loads a page that's the active tab.

I had thought the active tab was being shown correctly. But when I tested this, I found the active tab was given a URL that was _not_ in the group just picked. In fact it cloned another tab's URL from inside a different group, with the result that I had two tabs with the same URL in the whole system, but previously one tab with that URL.

The 17 tabs that looked like they were destroyed, were actually moved to another group. The group it chose looks random to me.

As well as replacing the contents of a group with "New tab" tabs and one duplicate of a tab from another group, the favicons shown in the STG group menu have an interesting quirk. All of the "New tab" tabs showed the Wikipedia favicon in my test. Only the first site in the list of tabs (before they were wiped) was Wikipedia, so it looks like the favicon is copied to the other "New tab" tabs. The active tab, which was duplicated from somewhere else, seems to have the correct favicon (it was Google). I don't know if that is a coincidence, or if the tab cloned was chosen because it matched the same domain (but not URL).

This test is a bit difficult to repeat, because each time I do it, the contents of an STG group are destroyed, and that persists, even if I restore the tabs from a sessionstore file.

jlokier on 28 Apr 2019

A bit more, from searching for tabs that are shown in groups before picking the group to display it.

I've found that rather than group-picking having a side effect of moving its tabs to another group (which seemed like a random group), this is what I see:

The group to be picked shows some tabs and looks normal, with favicons and titles.
But if I search for one of those tabs (using the URL bar in a new tab) and "Switch to" the tab that way, I find the tab exists in a _different_ STG group than the one seen in step 1.
Switching to the tab picks the different STG group, seen in step 2.
Picking the group from step 1 creates all "New tab" tabs except for one, and updates the STG group in step 1 to match these "New tab" tabs on the screen, but with strange favicons as described in my previous comment.
The strange creation of new tabs in step 4 increases the total number of tabs in the window (including hidden tabs). It's not that the group had lots of "New tab" tabs already, but that picking the group actually creates replacement tabs, increasing the total.

Maybe the problem is that somehow, a tab has ended up in multiple STG groups.

I understand that STG finds tabs by matching the URL. (If that's true, consider looking at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/sessions/setTabValue). That doesn't really explain the problem though.

This doesn't happen on all STG groups, by the way. Just... most of them, for me! Most of my groups were created, after installing STG, by going through 22 windows, creating a group for the tabs in that window, and then moving the group to my new "main" window which collects all the groups together. This is different from creating new groups and opening tabs in the groups, so this might affect test results.

jlokier on 28 Apr 2019

Hey. According to your story and test, it turns out that this add-on cannot work normally at all .. Unfortunately, I don’t have Mac OSX and can’t fully test it properly.
Yes, at the moment, the addon is looking for and matching the url of tabs and windows, but in the future I want to move away from it and save the data, which tab to which group belongs to the session. But even here there are some problems that I have to solve.

For a cleaner test, try creating a new Firefox profile and testing everything there without fear of losing data.

Drive4ik on 14 May 2019

I doubt it has anything to do with Mac OSX, because Firefox is much the same on all platforms.

But I could copy the Firefox profile over to Linux, if I wanted to do the same test again.

Not all groups and tabs were affected. The only tabs of mine that were affected by this behaviour, were the tabs I "imported" into STG, when I first installed and enabled STG, then visited each window to make a new group for each window, then started moving groups to the same window to tidy up.

Even after that, I think I only saw the problem after several kills and restarts of Firefox (due to other STG issues I've reported - failing to finish starting up, that sort of thing).

After the foregrounded tabs in a group had converted to "new tab" (and as comment 2 says, moving the real tab to somewhere else), I didn't see the problem happen again with the same tabs.

So it's not that it "cannot work normally", so much as there's a problem some of the time.

Anyway, I don't use STG now, because of the issues I've reported. It's a nice idea, but I put nearly 3 days effort into getting it going (it took a long time because of my large number of tabs, slowness of some operations, and uncertainty about lost tabs) and unfortunately I can't afford to risk that much time again. So this means I can't repeat a test of the kind I did when using it the first time. I might try STG again sometime, but if it's with a small number of tabs, to be honest I'm not expecting to see the same problems come up.

jlokier on 18 May 2019

Hi
I am having exact the same issue under Linux.
Right now I cannot say for sure if my history gets killed or if I get new tabs only. Will try to reproduce the issue.
RIght now I am a bit frightend loosing my working status of projects, which I have to do on research. Usign the plugin to have a interrupt option of my work (and to go on back later at the same status of the previous task)
How can I help to reproduce the issue, since it seems to be a more common issue.

dpalic on 11 Jun 2019

reproduced the cases.
In my case i am loosing tabs, which is really a big pain for me.
How can I help to dig down the problem? I am somehow able to debug also code if you need some help on this. Only need some short intro what to do.

dpalic on 11 Jun 2019

I am also seeing this, also running Linux. I am wondering if the option to save the tabs as bookmarks is interacting with the automatic backup in some weird way, such that the bookmarks are getting saved while in the bad state ("New Tab") and that on reopening FF the bookmarks are being used instead of the config stored in the extension...?

In either case, there is a correlation between the bookmark states and the tab states - I've only seen them _both_ broken, but not one or the other. I'm hoping I can catch a state where one is broken where the other is not. Presumably the one that breaks first would be closer to the source of the problem...

mainmachine on 8 Aug 2019

I am not 100% certain if this is the same problem, but it seems to me to be the same root cause.

This is easy to replicate:

Create a new tab group
Open the new group in a new window
Open a few tabs
Export Group to Bookmarks
Verify that group was added and links are populated
Close group Window
Open group in new Window again
Do not click on any tabs
Close the Window
Open group in new window again, click on any tab and they are "New Tab" and empty

It's as if the tabs are "asleep" until you click them, so if you close the group it saves them in that state...

mainmachine on 12 Aug 2019

👍1

I haven't put in the time to try to make this happen on purpose, but I have been victimized by this bug repeatedly, with seemingly random tabs (just two or three) seeming to change to "new tab" when I change to a group. I tend to switch back and forth between two groups, each of which has 50 - 100 tabs at any given time. I don't know how to figure out what they used to be, so I must be losing things but I don't know what. It is also possible that these "new tab" tabs scattered around the group are truly new and I'm not losing anything, but that is probably unreasonably optimistic.

I've also noticed that sometimes a tab will have moved to the right end position from wherever it was.

m60freeman on 13 Aug 2019

I have compared my daily backups from STG with a tab group that currently has this "new tab" problem, and I can confirm that the total number of tabs, "new tabs" plus unaffected tabs, is the same as the number of title/URL entries in the JSON file for that tab group. So this strongly suggests that these are not actually new tabs, but rather tabs that have not been restored correctly, or else restored but then lost on the next shutdown.

@Drive4ik - I am not well versed in javascript, but I do have some debugging skills and I can provide you with detailed debugging information. I find your extension incredibly useful and I'd like to help you fix this. I am willing to assist in any way that I can, even if it's just replicating a bug for diagnostic purposes.