Pale Moon forum

I have pinned a number of tabs, and have also installed the add-on App Tab Intialiser to ensure the pinned tabs are held no matter what.
However, I still experience all my pinned tabs are gone regularly.
Is there a way, perhaps with an effective add-on, or any other way, to hold those pinned tabs?

I don't have any advice to give, but I do have a similar problem with keeping the (very few) pinned tab I use. Just in case an improvement can also be made browser-side.

I have about:addons and about:config pinned and they persist after restart. No extra addon needed. I have not tried pinning any online pages so I'm not sure but it probably wouldn't matter (it would just reload the content I assume).

It could be related to your clear history settings. In Options / Privacy, do you have "Clear history when Pale Moon closes" checked? If so, click "Settings" and see what is checked there. The only ones I have checked (meaning to be cleared) are:
Active Logins, Cookies, Cache, and Offline Website Data. I do not know which one (if any) of the settings there in the Settings dialog is the critical one - I suspect either Site Preferences or Browsing and Download History - but you could try experimenting. sessionstore.rdf is the file in the profile folder where session (i.e. open tabs) data is stored, but I don't know that that would be affecting this.

EDIT: just tried pinning online page and it worked as I expected, pinned tab persisted and content was reloaded after restart

I have the settings set to not clear history etc. About:config & about:addons are not comparable to web pages, as far as I know.
Losing pinned web pages is irregular, but seems to be related to when PM is closed & you click on a web age hyperlink from an email, which then opens PM, but without the pinned tabs.
Anyway, it seems there is no good solution. Pity. I'll try not to open PM from a hyperlink in email.

It's stored in sessionstore.js. Here's an example for a web page I tried which I knew would not already be in my browsing history or bookmarks.

in sessionstore.js
"entries":[{"url":"http://www.cbsnews.com/","title":"CBS News - Breaking News, U.S., World, Business, Entertainment & Video","ID":201,"docshellID":43,"docIdentifier":201,"children":[{"url":"http://markets.cbsnews.com/widgets/mark ... itle":"CBS MoneyWatch Modules","ID":202,"docshellID":44,"referrer":"http://www.cbsnews.com/","docIdentifier ... roll":"0,0"}],"scroll":"0,0"}],"lastAccessed":0,"index":1,"pinned":true,"hidden":false,"attributes":{},"image":"http://www.cbsnews.com/favicon.ico"},

The url will also be in places.sqlite (bookmarks and history), but in the quick check I did I did not see anything there ID'ing it as a pinned tab.

So, to me that means something is off about your sessionstore.js file. One thing that would do what you're seeing is if the Pale Moon program is started with a different profile. Are you sure your default browser setting points to the same copy of PM and the same profile where you have the pinned tabs?

That's it for me. Someone else's turn.

mikeysc wrote:I have about:addons and about:config pinned and they persist after restart. No extra addon needed. I have not tried pinning any online pages so I'm not sure but it probably wouldn't matter (it would just reload the content I assume).

Well, I do use exactly these 2 same tabs as pinned tabs, and I do encouter the issue. Not with just closing and restarting, but more probably after some kind of computer restart. I doubt it's because I said to close a whole window with these tabs included, since this happens very very rarely. I already lost my pinned tabs a few times (and not always set them back), but without exactly checking in which conditions this happens. I'll report further the next time I lose my about:addons tab.

mikeysc wrote:It's stored in sessionstore.js. Here's an example for a web page I tried which I knew would not already be in my browsing history or bookmarks.

in sessionstore.js
"entries":[{"url":"http://www.cbsnews.com/","title":"CBS News - Breaking News, U.S., World, Business, Entertainment & Video","ID":201,"docshellID":43,"docIdentifier":201,"children":[{"url":"http://markets.cbsnews.com/widgets/mark ... itle":"CBS MoneyWatch Modules","ID":202,"docshellID":44,"referrer":"http://www.cbsnews.com/","docIdentifier ... roll":"0,0"}],"scroll":"0,0"}],"lastAccessed":0,"index":1,"pinned":true,"hidden":false,"attributes":{},"image":"http://www.cbsnews.com/favicon.ico"},

The url will also be in places.sqlite (bookmarks and history), but in the quick check I did I did not see anything there ID'ing it as a pinned tab.

So, to me that means something is off about your sessionstore.js file. One thing that would do what you're seeing is if the Pale Moon program is started with a different profile. Are you sure your default browser setting points to the same copy of PM and the same profile where you have the pinned tabs?

That's it for me. Someone else's turn.

This is a very technical answer, though I doubt it is usable because most of the time my pinned tabs stay. In fact, today I opened PM by clicking on an email hyperlink (contrary to my good intention as posted above) & lo & behold my pinned tabs were still there.
But I know I will lose them again some time in the future, and I still believe that, until this gets fixed by the programmer, a temporary stop-gap is likely to be an add-on, if a good one exits.

Session Store for pinned tabs will only restore them for the last window closed. For instance if you have two windows one with pinned tabs one without and you close the one with pinned tabs first then the last window closed is one without them when you relaunch the browser it will not restore the pinned tabs because it figures you do not want them because the last browser window closed to exit the process did not have any to restore.

The workarounds are as follows. When closing windows make sure the window with pinned tabs is the last one you close OR use the exit menu item without directly closing the window with pinned tabs.

@ Matt Tobin: using the menu/exit route seems best so I''l try that. Thanks fot the tip.