Reviews for Session Sync
Session Sync by Gabriel Ivanica
234 reviews
- Rated 4 out of 5by Firefox user 13469087, 5 years agoNot being mean with the stars, but COULD.... the autosave stopped working at some point and when I need it, I was screwed. Lost my session after a crash and had none in my history. Still none will show up in my history. Have turned autosave function on/off, played with other settings... nothing. Makes it less than useless, a liability instead. Hoping you have a fix.
Developer response
posted 5 years agoUpdate
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I updated the addon. The new version should not have the same problem. I'll try to add more advanced feature in next releases to make sure that storage can't be deleted by such an error.
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I'm really really sorry about the issue. I think I found a problem related to why history session might disappear suddenly and I will try to have a fix today, or later tomorrow. I really appreciate that you didn't go straight to 1 star and I promise that I will do my best to fix it as soon as possible. Will update this comment once the fix is ready.
Sadly I discovered after I launched the addon that addon storage seems not to be that reliable, having in mind that even by reinstalling the addon you can lose everything. I think I will add a form of secondary backup (or even some form of manual backup) to make sure things are more reliable.
I know many people rely on the auto-save function but the addon is mainly developed for manual saving of sessions as bookmark. I kinda made the wrong decision to provide an auto-saving feature at some point and sadly that created a lot more problem than I expected.
Again, really sorry, I will do my best to make sure things like this can't happen again. - Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 12399213, 5 years ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by vadimm, 6 years agoMostly works well, and i like the design, but i noticed 2 problems. When you manually save session - pinned tabs are not saved as pinned, they just open in the beginning (it doesn't happen with autosave). I guess it happens because manually saved session tabs a saved as bookmarks. And also when you click save session and then click cancel - it saves anyway, just without name - only timestamp. And it would be great if there was an option to manually save session in bookmarks or, like autosave session, in sqlite database in addon data storage folder.
Edit:
I've got your point. Regarding saving in sqlite database in addon data storage folder (which i agree doesn't look reliable) it can be optional, or saving in bookmarks can be optional as a backup. For example another popular addon Tab Session Manager has an option to backup sessions in .json file in a downloads folder when browser starts. Old Michael Kraft's Session Manager XUL addon just saved .session files in profile folder. Anyway you've made a really good addon. Thank you.Developer response
posted 6 years agoYeah, sadly once the addon API changed Mozilla removed the possibility to store additional data alongside a bookmark and all the functionality that was based on that (pinned information, and other tab session information) was no longer going to work. I do have a solution in mind to provide this back, but sadly it's not something that can be as reliable as bookmarks and I'm not really sure if on the long run is not worse to implement something that may work only until you delete the addon and then just lose that data suddenly because it was saved in addon storage.
Regarding the "click cancel". Well that's not really what it happens there but I get why you thought that. That dialogue it's actually meant for you to edit the name of the session (which is already saved) so basically clicking cancel will just leave the session with the default name. The same edit box will show if you just go over any other session and edit it's name. I totally missed that it an create confusion if I show the edit box right after saving a session, that's a great observation and I'll think about it if there's anything that ca be done to improve the experience so that saving steps may be more clear. So this is not really a issue... everything works as it should... but I will think about the whole saving process to see if there's anything I can improve to be sure things can get confusing.
I'm not really sure I do understand the 3'rd statement :
"And it would be great if there was an option to manually save session in bookmarks or, like autosave session, in sqlite database in addon data storage folder."
So, saving in bookmarks is manually... or you wanted to say automatically save ?
Regarding addon storage... well that's seems to be problematic since it's not really reliable. Addon storage is there only if you have the addon installed. If by mistake (your or because of Firefox) the addon is removed, add the data associated with that specific addon is deleted right away. For example this is what happenes with the auto-saved sessions, they are simply deleted by Firefox when the addon is removed. So storing anything valuable in addon storage it's not something I can do right now , probably after I add some form of full backup, but even then it seems to me that the addon storage is really good for nothing because it give users the apparent idea that data is save but it's just isn't.
If you have any other feedback you can contact me directly over email (use the Feedback button from the addon menu) or if you have any feature request (or issue) you can also send it to https://github.com/ReDEnergy/SessionSync.
Thanks for detailed feedback (and for using the addon) - Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 15060820, 6 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Amy, 6 years agoDevs made real all my suggestions! This extension is almost ideal now, thank you!! ☺
Developer response
posted 6 years agoThank you as well for using the addon, and for the great rating :) Developer response
posted 6 years agoThanks for using the addon. I'm really glad that you find it useful.- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 13244450, 6 years agoThe error I was getting is now somehow disappeared. So I changed my rating from 2 stars to 5 stars.
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posted 6 years agoThanks for the update...
Now, there's no perfect software out there and I'm pretty sure there can be a few bugs into my addon as well but I try to fix them as soon as possible if they really brake the functionality. If you ever have problems again please don't have any reservation in using the feedback option from the addon to contact me because It's way faster to discuss about certain issues and understand better how to deal with that and I can assure you that I do everything possible to fix problems very fast.
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Hi. Any chance You can contact me directly over email to solve this issue. It may happen that some bookmarks were saved wrong somehow (it's fixable). If the page is really one of those links then that's not an issue, but If the page is suppose to be a web page then maybe it was saved wrong. Anyway I need to know what URL did the page had, if it's not a restricted URL then probably like I said maybe after a Firefox update or add-on update something was saved wrong. There was another user that had a similar problem and we fixed it. - Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 15013727, 6 years agoit's just amazing great job and thank you a lot
Developer response
posted 6 years agoThanks a lot! For me, it's amazing when others find it as useful as myself because I never quite expected that something that I build for myself will be as useful for others as well :D I'm really glad you like it. - Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 15006177, 6 years agoThis is an awesome tab management. Really friendly and simple but powerful. I really like it. In my notebook great! But, when I tried use it in my cell phone don´t work, only a page blank (in the bar show: moz-extension://1098... Gabriel may you help me please?
*** Update ***
Thanks Gabriel, was my fault. The Session Sync is really great, go on!Developer response
posted 6 years agoThanks for the review. Sadly the addon is not working right now on mobile (it has some issues with the API from mobile and I couldn't get it to work a while back - I should try again maybe I can make it work now). There should be no way to install it on Firefox mobile and I really have no idea how you managed to install it that because it's not supported and there's no official version for mobile so this is quite strange that you managed to do that.
Of course everything you saved into bookmarks you can access them on the mobile device (as long as you have configured Firefox Sync account to sync bookmarks).. It's not perfect but at least if you really need access to the saved session you can open them. - Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 13226748, 6 years agoI've tried all sorts of session and tab management plugins in several browsers. This plugin is a real gem. I develop websites for many clients, and I often need to keep a record of several urls for each one - the abiility to save groups of tabs grouped under my client name is a huge benefit. I can simply re-open a group of pages when I need to. I've found that other tab/session managers tend to have little control over whether they restore tabs to the same window, or even replace the current session completely - not so with Session Sync - you can open the tabs in the same window, or a new one. Or even open tabs individually if you prefer. One other nice touch, is that the saved 'sessions' are actually saved as bookmark groups, so even if the addon stops working, I still have all of them saved. Massively useful, and I'm not sure I could manage without it. Many thanks to Gabriel for an essential addon.
Developer response
posted 6 years agoThanks a lot for the kind words and the nice review. It matters a lot to me to know that there people out there that really appreciate it and it gives me another good reason to continue to improve it further. - Rated 5 out of 5by ZevSua, 6 years ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by Firefox user 13989341, 6 years agoThis is definitely a sensational session manager which couldn't have emerged at a better time after the other session managers had been rendered useless by the new Firefox Quantum. Undeniably, a commendable and benevolent job by the developer. However, lately, I've found that the drag and delete from the "Active snapshot" window doesn't work. I would appreciate it if you could provide a right click and delete option rather than a drag and drop style of deletion. Presently, the right click only provides the options of opening pages in new tab/window. It would become a five-star extension for me. For your reference, I'm on Centos 7 and have been using Firefox Quantum 60.4.0esr (64-bit).
Developer response
posted 6 years agoHi and thanks for the review.
The thing is I didn't add a delete option the the "Active snapshot" because basically once the auto-save timer is triggered everything will be rewritten so deleting something from there can only work for as long as the auto-save timer is not triggered.
Now... I seriously should add the option to delete some other stuff... like closed windows from there because they can keep stacking up and there's no way to remove them right now.
Also I can definitely add the option you're talking for all the other saved sessions from the History Tab since there those will not be changing at all and you should be able to do whatever you want. I will let it available for the "Active snapshot" as well.. just in case someone wants to save things right after deleting a saved tab but as I was saying if the re-saves is triggered during that time... everything will be there again and I can't really do something about it.
Drag-n-drop was not implemented fully for History sessions but I will try to add support for as many things as possible even there.
Will try to implement this as soon as possible. If you remember about it when using the addon, I hope you will remember about this review as well and update it if it really becomes "a five-star extension" :)
Thanks for using the addon. - Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 13489034, 6 years ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by Firefox user 14684406, 6 years agoLots of good features, but one important thing it seems to be missing is a one-click "save and close all tabs" button (in the style of OneTab and others). I'd also prefer to have context menu options and/or text labels on the popup menu toolbar, as I don't find the icons that intuitive. It would be one of my favourite extensions if it weren't for those aspects.
** Update ** To give a little more information on the tab closure suggestion, I think the way OneTab does it is to save & close all tabs in the current window and leave the window open with a blank tab, although that aspect might actually be down to my browser settings. I tend to have just one Firefox window open at a time, but it could perhaps be configurable to choose whether it acts on all open windows or just the current one. This feature is a big thing for me in terms of how valuable the add-on is, as when my browser gets too cluttered or I need to break off and do something else, I'd like to be able to just quickly click to save everything and come back to a nice clean window, when I can then restore tabs one by one as I want to work on them. Nonetheless, on reflection I think maybe my original 3* rating was a little harsh, I've decided to make it 4*, but I think the addition of this save & close option would push it up to 5 for me, along with the labelling enhancement - good to hear that's planned. Just to emphasise, I think speed and ease of use is really important, so that when busy I can save or restore in one or two clicks without really having to switch between views or figure out which button to click.
Finally, one other thought is that some add-ons (e.g. TabStash) make use of the sidebar, and I like that as it provides instant access to sessions and reminds me what I have queued up as I can have it showing all the time. I realise that's probably quite a big thing to implement, but maybe worth considering? Thanks!
** Update 2 ** One other feature that would be very welcome would be a one-click option to remove an entry from a session when restoring/reopening it. So let's say I saved a session yesterday with sites A-F, and today I'm reopening sites A-C to work in them. Instead of having to click on each to restore and then go back to each and delete from the session, it would be nice to have an "Open and remove" option (which could perhaps be set as default left-click behaviour if preferred, maybe with a shift-to-override option too). Would be great if you'd consider adding this please! ThanksDeveloper response
posted 6 years ago** Update **
Thanks for all the details. I will try to add the save and close feature in the next update. There will be 2-3 configuration settings to check for it initially to make it as you wish since I still need to consider everyone's ideas when implementing this but as long as it's a one time thing should be fine.
Regarding the sidebar... that requires a lot UI restructuring and that might take some time but I would consider this as well for future updates. Thanks.
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Can you please provide more information about how would you expect the addon to work when all tabs are closed ? All tabs from the current session or all windows and just leave one window (in case the session saves all windows and not just the current one). There's a thread here (https://github.com/ReDEnergy/SessionSync/issues/33) related to this issue, maybe you can provide your idea as well so that I can have multiple input on how to solve this.
I put tooltips for the toolbar menu but I suppose that you still need to move over them to understand them exactly what they do. Sadly, Firefox limits to 800 px the width of the addon so I can only put there labels for a few actions before I'm left with no space and that's why I used only icons. But, It's planed to have an option to also show the text along the icon, or only the text. I will try to provide this option as soon as possible.
So, If i fix those 2 issues then would you consider it a 5 star addon? Isn't there anything else? Because it's kinda hard for me to get how these only 2 issues make the addon a 3/5 star. I know it's hard to please everyone, but just think that it usually takes a lot of time to develop such an addon and the only reason why a developer would continue it is because there are users that support it, not financially, but by understanding that even if it's not perfect it can be improved. Of course, don't get me wrong, I'm not asking you to change the rating, but only to consider that low ratings can really hurt addons on the long run and are not really helping their development. Yes a review is also personal, it doesn't have to reflect everyone preferences, but it's really hard for me as a developer to add support for everything from the start. In time I might be able to do so but community support is valuable. Got a lot of request and ideas from users (https://github.com/ReDEnergy/SessionSync/issues) but implementing all of them is really challenging because many can be contradictory or were never in the original scope of the product. - Rated 4 out of 5by Firefox user 14780592, 6 years agoSession Sync is the closest thing I could find to Session Buddy on Chrome, which is nearly perfect.
One thing I miss is the ability to close a tab from the extension, which is useful when closing multiple tabs and cleaning up a session.Developer response
posted 6 years agoHi. Thanks a lot for review. I really have no idea why I didn't think about that. I will add an option to do that in the next release. Probably using a context menu I will be adding more common features for interacting with open tabs. - Rated 5 out of 5by Jesse, 6 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 14280832, 6 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 14753988, 6 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by wurgburg, 6 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 14140606, 6 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by tabbykitty, 6 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 11737590, 6 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 13879475, 6 years ago
- Rated 2 out of 5by Firefox user 14675417, 6 years ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 14658957, 6 years agoIt works as expected and looks decent. Branding is good. I'd prefer not overloading the bookmarking system for storage. It causes problems. It also makes cross-browser difficult. Dropbox sync plus a new Chrome extension and you'd win the "Session Manager" showdown easily.
Developer response
posted 6 years agoThere are a lot of addons that do similar things yet all of them are somehow different. In this case... the bookmarking system is actually a core feature of the addon. I do understand that it's not perfect but there's no perfect solution. Perfect it's an individual preference and as a developer it's impossible for me to target everything. And I think that's fine, each of us will look for that we think fits better our needs.
That being said, I'm sorry that you consider the bookmarking system a not so good fit for this, but sadly it's a core feature of the product and it's impossible to change. If I would do that ever it will definitely be a different addon. I believe that that Sync-ing with Dropbox or other solutions might be another good feature but at the same time without offering a cross-browser solution it can be quite pointless. Why there's no Chrome port of this addon. Simply because I don't have time to write it. I have so many features waiting on the list to be implemented into this addon, but at the same time the Chrome version is not so important for me as a developer. This addon was built for Firefox and I continue to do so as a thanks for the Mozilla community. It's for Firefox and I don't think I really want to provide a Chrome version because I don't want to promote a different browser. And of course... competing with Session Buddy is quite pointless at this moment. That doesn't mean I won't do this ever but for the moment I clearly have no motivation to do so.
Ultimately, the addon can't be perfect for everyone, but it can be almost perfect for those that find it useful as it is. Thanks for considering using it.