Tab Groups 0.3 and PM 28

[sonicp]

The PM update to 28 went as smoothly as any other update for me - kudos to the devs on that. FF upgrades made me increasingly nervous as it crashed and burned in new and unpredictable ways until I ditched it a few years ago. I'm not going there ever again. Saw a couple of good new things in PM 28 are now available, like drag and drop for pages that support it. Memory usage seemed about the usual with a crazy number of open tabs, so very happy with that.

I've since downgraded to 27 again though, as I couldn't get tab groups working (http://addons.palemoon.org/addon/tabgroups/). The downgrade to 27 went smoothly, which was also pretty awesome - fear of downgrading and settings being messed up - also a real thing PM devs have handled with care. The tab group option appears in 28, but doesn't do anything via either the icon or menu option. I seem to remember this was a brief issue in a previous upgrade long ago.

Should I be using a different groups add-on for PM 28 for compatibility, or is it meant to work with 28?

[Nigaikaze]

Should I be using a different groups add-on for PM 28 for compatibility, or is it meant to work with 28?

Search is your friend. Already discussed in several places, here is a relevant post from Moonchild:

viewtopic.php?f=46&t=15887&p=148053&hil ... ps#p148053

[Tomaso]

To save you from any further search, you can get Tab Groups v2.1.4 (by Quicksaver) here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addo ... sion-2.1.4
To install, simply download the XPI file, then drag it into Pale Moon's Extensions window.

[Kenaz]

I tried it with the add-on tab Groups v2.1.4, but it does not work here!

[SpockFan02]

Quicksaver's Tab Groups in combination with Tab Groups Helper work with Pale Moon 28. The interface is different, but it's functional.

[Kenaz]

Hab es mit all diesen Add-ons schon probiert! Aber da kommt höchstens einfach nur unbrauchbarer Mist bei raus. Irgendetwas muss ich da wohl verkehrt machen!

[SpockFan02]

Pale Moon 28 is different from 27 and Pale Moon Tab Groups 0.3 doesn't work with it anymore—Someone will have to figure out what needs to be changed and update it. Quicksaver's Tab Groups is not intended for Pale Moon and does not work on its own, but with Tab Groups Helper, it can be used. I do not know German, but machine translation gives me an idea of what you said.

[Alaskan_User]

Found a decent workaround for accessing the Tab Groups window pane. I have both the Palemoon "Tab Groups" (version 0.3) and the Firefox "Tab Groups" (version 2.1.4) installed and active at the same time.

By disabling, then immediately re-enabling, the Firefox version (which does NOT require a restart) I can bring up the Tab Groups interface. There are settings for the layout, which includes the same kind of graphical interface used by the Palemoon version, as well as the ability to customize the shortcut key (found under the extension's "Options" from the Add-ons Manager).

Each time the browser starts or restarts, I have to repeat the disable & re-enable on the Firefox version, but for the rest of the session I have access to the Tab Groups.

I've experimented with having the Palemoon version disabled, but at that point the Firefox version does not bring up any sort of interface. The tabs and groups I had from Palemoon 27 are still present in Palemoon 28, including their positions and group labels.

[Alaskan_User]

With more experimentation in using Palemoon and Firefox versions of "Tab Groups" together, one of the reasons the two seem to work is that by using "Dorando Key Config" I have assigned Tab Groups (Palemoon version, I'm assuming) to the same keyboard shortcut as the Firefox version. If the Palemoon version of "Tab Groups" is assigned to a different keyboard shortcut than the one set in the Firefox version's option panel, then the Tab Groups view pane does not initiate.

The shortcut I have assigned is the control key plus the spacebar.

[unknownone]

I also confirm that the Tab Group functionality is brought back by using Palemoon "Tab Groups" (version 0.3) and the Firefox "Tab Groups" (version 2.1.4) installed and active at the same time. The "Tab Helper" plugin is not required and "Dorando Key Config" for Palemoon allows to set a working keyboard shortcut for the Tab group main UI view (but it is not required to make the tab group button work). The "Free arrange" layout mode corresponds to the same kind of graphical interface used by the Palemoon versions.

I still have the issue that after each Palemoon restart, the Firefox "Tab Groups" has to be disabled and then immediately re-enabled (which does NOT require a restart) to bring up the Tab Groups interface for the whole session.

I hope that someone can fix the Palemoon version of Tab Groups or the developer of Firefox "Tab Groups" (version 2.1.4) port it to Palemoon 28.

[WouterK]

I've managed to make Tab Groups 0.3 work again in PM 28.0.0 by fixing two problems:

1. As remarked by JustOff in https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?t=19244, all global "let" must be replaced with "var", cf. UXP issue #155.
So I simply replaced all "let" at the beginning of lines: this amounted to 21 changes in 11 source files.
Please note that I'm not an expert, so I'm not sure all of these changes were correct and whether there aren't any others I've missed.
However, these changes did made TG work again with Pale Moon <=28.0.0b2.

2. In UXP commit 764d0af25ea2c5713958a4b8b8c524b09640a24c ("Reconfigure Pale Moon", dated 2018-07-08), Moonchild removed the browser.panorama.animate_zoom setting from palemoon.js.
Consequently, Pale Moon >=28.0.0b3 gets terminally stuck in the "Group Your Tabs" window.
[Warning: this is really bad: the only way out seems to be to kill PM and remove a particular session file (I can't remember which one right now) from the profile in order to avoid getting stuck again immediately upon restart.]
I fixed this by inserting the following line in defaults/preferences/preferences.js:

Code: Select all

pref("browser.panorama.animate_zoom", true);

This fixes the problem in PM 28.0.0.

In https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=19840 Moonchild indicated that he doesn't have the time to maintain Tab Groups any more but that he can still provide the logistics for it:

If anyone wants to figure out what is needed to make Tab groups 0.3 up to speed with Pale Moon 28, that would be great. Pull requests are welcome on the repo -- i can do the release engineering for it and all, but simply don't have the time to dive into the research needed to figure out why it's not working and how to address it.

So I don't know the most practical way to make my fixes available to everybody (assuming that they are indeed more or less correct and acceptable).
The problem is: even though I use git myself for my own applications (I'm an independent developer), I don't have an account at github, and I'm not sure I want to start one just for this issue: I'd have to dive into how to sign up and make a pull request etc.
So if anybody else can commit these not-too-difficult changes, it's fine with me.

[yami_]

FYI: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=19993&p=149005#p149005

[Moonchild]

WouterK,

Thanks for having a look. Making the changes available is as simple as exporting a git-style diff or patch and sending it to me. I can update the extension in that case with the patch and publish an update for v28

[WouterK]

Ah yes, I hadn't thought of sending you git patches, but that's a very good idea.
OK: I've PM'ed you a zip file containing my changes.

[SpockFan02]

Awesome! I'm glad you figured out why it was getting stuck in the groups view.

[Moonchild]

OK, I *think* I have adapted everything needed thanks to Wouter's and Ketmar's posts on the subject.

Attached is the result (I haven't had time to test it yet).
Can you please give this a test run and let me know if it works or what else should be changed?

[unknownone]

Thank you for this fix! I'm testing it and the tab groups are accessible again without using any other plugin.

The first problem that I'm facing is that if I try to close the browser, a dialog window appears warning that I'm about to close all the tabs that I have open (in all groups). This dialog usually appears only when different windows are closed. Can I do something to prevent loosing the tabs?

Update:
I reactivated the Tab Groups v2.1.4 (by Quicksaver) plugin and saved a .json file with the open tab groups as a backup. Then I went on and closed Palemoon. After restarting, the groups were gone and I had the default start page. I tried to recover the tab groups from the json file using Tab Groups v2.1.4, but it wasn't where I saved it (either it wasn't really saved in the first place, or it somehow got deleted), so the tabs were really lost. At this point I checked what would happen when opening new tabs in different tab groups and closing Palemoon, and this time no warning dialog appeared and the new open tabs and groups were preserved during subsequent restarts.

I remembered that the Tab Groups Helper plugin (currently deactivated) had saved the session information of previous days in different "sessionstore.js" files. I went in my Palemoon profile folder and noticed that the sessionstore.js file was much smaller in size, I guess because all the old stored tabs and groups where gone and only few new ones where saved. With Palemoon closed, I replaced the sessionstore file with its backup and restarted the browser. It opened the view to restore the old session, as if there has been a crash, I restored it and now all my tabs are back. So apparently the new version 0.4 of Tab Groups has no major issues.

The only cosmetic issue that I notice with the new version is that the background on the Tab groups view uses a stretched version of my persona theme header and adds a lot of white filler color below, as you can see in this screenshot https://imgur.com/a/CIMwpfJ . I believe that previously the background was grey or a stretched header down to the bottom of the UI.

Update 2:
The cosmetic issue is gone after switching the theme to the default one and then back to my chosen persona theme.

[unknownone]

For whoever looks at this thread, there is another one where this topic is discussed https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=19993&start=20#p149221 and where a newer plugin version is provided with a fix for the website icons. Moonchild uploaded it now also to the addons repository http://addons.palemoon.org/addon/tabgroups/

[Kenaz]

Thanks to everyone who got Tab Groups up and running again.