Tabs which have been put into a group mysteriously disappear.

[GWHAYWOOD]

I usually run three browser windows for three broad categories of work.

Window 1 is monitoring the status of the machines I control.
Window 2 is documents to which I routinely refer during my work.
Window 3 is security; monitoring the physical security of installations, mail systems, abuse etc.

All have muiltiple tabs open at all times.

Window 2 generally has about 50 tabs groups in it. One of those is used for RFCs, mostly pages on ietf.org.
This tab group itself has about 50 tabs in it.

Every now and again, a number of the tabs in the RFC tab group disappears.
I don't know when this happens. Next time I look at it, the group appears to have been reduced to only perhaps half a dozen tabs. There doesn't seem to be a way to navigate to the missing tabs.

If I use the tab search box to find one of the missing tabs (I'll generally have a pretty good idea of what to search for in the RFCs) then the missing tabs miraculously reappear in the tab list but they are no longer in the group - they aren't in any group - so I'll have to group them all over again.

This is a little frustrating but it does not appear to cause any loss of data.

[PikachuEXE]

Do you mind sharing more details like

• browser version
• TK extensions installed with their versions
• TK settings

I use only use Palemoon for non critical stuff right now.
And I haven't experience tab disappearing issue once.
I need to be able to reproduce to investigate and maybe fix this.

Also do you mean some tabs are ungrouped sometimes or disappear completely from tab bar?

[GWHAYWOOD]

Thanks once again for your quick response. The browser version as described by Help->About is "is Pale Moon Version: 29.4.1 (64-bit)". I am not aware that I have any TK extensions installed, perhaps there are but if so I don't know how they got there nor how to find them. Perhaps you can explain to me.

The tabs disappear from the tab bar. At first I thought they were completely lost but I tried hard for some hours to find them and eventually discovered that they could be recovered by using the search box. Yes, when they return to the tab bar they are not in any group - so for example if they had been coloured orange, the same as the other RFC tabs, when they return they are all grey, and all occupy the full width of the tab bar. In case it's important I have the tabs in a vertical column on the left hand side of the screen.

There are a couple of improvements I could suggest for some of the wording in the menus. They are minor changes, would you like me to put them in this thread, or start another, or send email, or...?

[GWHAYWOOD]

Oh - "TK extensions" - perhaps you mean what version of TabKit2 itself? That is 0.14.0, I reinstalled the latest version from Github on 4th October 2021 but I guess this is the same version that I started with because I have only been using it for a few weeks. Settings are mostly default, is there an easy way to list all the settings so that I can send them to you?

[PikachuEXE]

Settings sharing - just post screenshots for the panels with settings changed from default

TK extensions - I mean Tab Kit Series Extensions

I just refer TabKit as TK coz I am lazy :P

As for the tab becoming ungrouped I am not sure how to reproduce it
I will keep this issue open but I can't action until there are steps to reproduce it with high probability

For the suggestion for wording please open another issue (otherwise becomes quite mixed up and hard to read later)

[GWHAYWOOD]

I seem to be unable to attach files to an issue comment - a file manager pops up, but when I select the files nothing happens - so I have put some screen shots at

http://www.jubileegroup.co.uk/misc/[1-7].gif

The shots show the TK extension page in the browser, and all the settings that I know about.

HTH

Pika Edit:

• http://www.jubileegroup.co.uk/misc/1.gif
• http://www.jubileegroup.co.uk/misc/2.gif
• http://www.jubileegroup.co.uk/misc/3.gif
• http://www.jubileegroup.co.uk/misc/4.gif
• http://www.jubileegroup.co.uk/misc/5.gif
• http://www.jubileegroup.co.uk/misc/6.gif
• http://www.jubileegroup.co.uk/misc/7.gif

[PikachuEXE]

I do have a Palemoon portable at home but I don't remember I encountered any tab ungrouped before.
Is there anything specific about the timing or the tabs gone "missing" (ungrouped)?

I also create bookmarks for those truly important tabs as backup.
If you are using windows you might want multiple Palemoon portable for different purposes instead of multiple windows.

[GWHAYWOOD]

I wish I could put my finger on something which would reliably repeat the problem, or even something which is common to tabs which disappear, but so far I have not noticed anything. I am sure that I will see something eventually, but it seems to happen while I am doing something else with a tab or tab groups and it is not obvious when it has happened so I have to try to remember a lot of things. It does not seem to have happened since you so kindly provided the zip containing the fix for the close buttons - but of course that was not very long ago.

I am using Linux - Debian 'Buster':

$ cat /etc/debian_version
10.10
$ uname -a
Linux laptop3 4.19.0-17-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.19.194-3 (2021-07-18) x86_64 GNU/Linux
$

[PikachuEXE]

Then let's revisit this when that happens again
I can't do much without reproducing it -,-

[GWHAYWOOD]

It happened again this morning - or it might have been yesterday. I still haven't found a way to reproduce it and for a couple of days I wondered if the previous fix had somehow fixed this one. Perhaps this contributed to my being less rigorous about when I checked for a recurrence.

A (very little) extra information:

1. More than one tab group is affected.
2. Some of the groups disappear completely, other groups retain some of the tabs.
3. For some tab groups it matters to me in what order the tabs are listed. In the case of groups which retain some of their tabs, after the loss the order in which the remaining tabs are listed is scrambled. The same is true after the recovery of completely lost tab groups.
4. When the "Search Tabs" box is used to recover the lost tabs (for example today I typed "rfc" into the box to recover dozens of lost RFC tabs) then not only do the lost RFC tabs reappear but so also do many other lost tabs from other lost groups.
5. Cosmetic (almost) issue: After recovering tabs I have to regroup them. In the menu (right-click tab -> Tab Kit -> "Group Tabs From Here To ...") the wording "Group Tabs From Here To..." is ambiguous - it should say "Group Tabs From Here To Currently Displayed Tab" or something like that. There's plenty of room for the text. I believe that it does say something like that in at least one other place in the menus, but I can't remember where I saw it.
6. When the list contains more than a few dozen tabs, the list extends past the bottom of the screen and there seems to be no way to view the part below the screen. This is more than cosmetic.
7. Don't rely on my memory, but I get the feeling that it's almost like the tab groupings revert to how they were some time ago. Maybe it's just a 'save' which doesn't get executed?

HTH

[PikachuEXE]

I suggest using session manager
to make regular backup of your tabs and their states.

I would look into other small suggestions but I am on vacation this week.

"tab groupings revert" might be caused by bug in extension. But unless it happens every time the browser started/restarted it should not be TabKit's issue.

[GWHAYWOOD]

Thanks for the tips, I'll look into session manager and I'll try restarting the browser more often to see if that might be triggering the issue - most of the time I don't restart it from one week to the next because I'm too lazy...

Have a great vacation!

[GWHAYWOOD]

There's some progress in finding a way to repeat the issue!

I just shut down Palemoon and restarted it. Immediately on restarting it, the tabs groupings were lost.

As you suggested, I had saved the session using 'session manager', but it does not seem to help to recover the lost tab groups. Unless I'm missing something, it does not seem to understand tab groupings at all. No matter, as I said the tabs are only ungrouped, they are not actually lost, so all I have to do is regroup them. Again. :(

[PikachuEXE]

I remember an issue of tab groups of some tabs are not saved as they are not loaded.
That's due to tab's session/state management design by the browser and can't be fixed.
I am not sure if your issue is caused by the above reason.