cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2287782
Personally, while I've been using Tab Session Manager for years, I've had lots of issues with it. There have been a few times where all my sessions would be completely wiped after restarting Firefox or having it crash, which is why I have the backup folder setting enabled. Very occasionally within the past few years, but much more often lately, when I'd try to restore sessions, all of which consist of 100s of tabs, I'd find a bunch of tabs missing, being replaced with blank new tab pages. Also note that this has happened across different computers and Firefox installations.
Looking at the changes / commits made to the extension since its last update made last September, the developer has only updated the readme page and a few other non-code related things. there are hundreds of unaddressed issues on the repo.
It seems like I should really move away from it, what are alternative extensions you would recommend?
just fyi, that might be an issue with the specific pages and not with the addon. Some pages, use a single page approce and store navigational / page structure information in cookies or other header tokens which have mostly a limited lifetime, this also prevents restoring a page purely from the url, when these informations are not valid/available anymore.
What does that mean?
Where can I read more about this?
I haven't noticed any patterns between it and specific domains or types of pages I've accesseed, it seems very random, since I noticed all those new tab pages are next to each other. I could have 100s of tabs open, and have like 10-15 tabs that are blank but all next to each other. I do have other new tab pages but in places where I left them at the time of saving that particular session. 10-15 blank tabs, plus other new tab pages where I left them.
Simple way to confirm/deny if a tabs has this restriction would be if you can restore a tab by manually reloading. If you can, then it could be either browser related or ... might just be some networking/connection issue with the page.
Now I doubt that this is the problem, because those pages shouldn't become completely blank, but here's an explanation:
A single page application is like a native app in the way it behaves, but made with web technologies and manually fit to the browser workflow, in the older, standard approach we just delivered single web pages and maybe added a little interactivity on top with JavaScript so we had routes like these:
example.org/index.htmlexample.org/about.htmlEach page is its own html file and you access it with its path.
Now there is no rule that what goes into the URL bar should match 1 to 1 with the filesystem on the server so you could go on
example.org/news.htmland actually get served a page that is under2023/07/28/something-interesting.html, there is logic running on the server that decides that if a client requests the news page, the server should send over today's news page.You'll see that all the time when you try to go to a page that doesn't exist anymore and so you are redirected to
example.org/404.htmlsaying you asked for some resource, but it wasn't found.In the same vein you can handle these routes on the client , you could send all the content to the user when they enter
example.org, but you let JavaScript take care of what to display, so all the text of index, about, etc. is already on your PC and by clicking the links, which will have the same format, maybe minus the.html(though you could absolutely do that before too, just that here it conveys a specific meaning that in fact you aren't sending requests for html files, but just "routes"):example.org/indexexample.org/aboutAnd even if those links appear in your URL bar they have all been resolved on the client with JavaScript, by simply changing the content appearing on the screen and never getting a completely new page, that would have no problem always resolving.
But when adding state to the mix, where you have something that is really a web app, you can't always get the same thing back, suppose I have a task list (in reference to technical React example) and create two items, I click on the second and I get
example.org/tasks/2, I send you that link and you open the page for the first time on your computer, it won't work, it will probably fall back to a home route, because your state was different than mine, you had no task 2 yet, this is also called deep-linking. For that to work you have to store that state and since you're working in the browser you have to rely on its storge APIs, usually there is no storage that is guaranteed to be permanent on a browser, because its settings could affect when/if the storage gets cleared and suddenly I can't see my task 2 anymore either after some time.Good explaination 👍
That's a good explanation. I knew some of it, but I don't see why the tabs have to be blank. Even I have pages with deep links, I just want a session manager to save all the opened URLs and restore them without having any blank pages.
Yes, in fact I did say I doubt that's the problem. I suggest you try either Simple Tab Groups or Sidebery, I never had issues with those with hundreds of tabs (I may have a slight issue with tab management XD), but they probably don't cover all the features of this extension
People have already explained it but I have gotten the blank page thing with chrome and firefox with their integrated open tabs previously open thing. Mostly it happens with pages that are logged into something. As for tab session I have used it for a long time and I actually had some issues with it years ago especially playing well with power tabs but its been fine for a long time. When I did lose pages long ago I was able to just go to the last save point before the most current which was generally almost the same. Again though I personally have not had issues with it for a long time. Outside of the blank page thing but again I have seen that with all tab recovery things including the native ones.