Reviews for Simple Tab Groups
Simple Tab Groups by Drive4ik
Review by Firefox user 13856192
Rated 3 out of 5
by Firefox user 13856192, 7 years ago[Update: just noticed that Simple Tab Groups (STG) was updated today - to v2.4.8. This is according to FF\Recent Updates, which also states "Sorry, but there was an error loading the release notes". Might any of these factors be something to do with my total loss of all tabs and groups!?!? Seems I'm having Certificate issues in FF now also. Concidence? Mmh]
OK. In principle this add-on is exactly what's required: and easy way to switch between groups of tabs.
By this I mean it should be like a "bookmarking plus" process, whereby a group of tabs is opened, new tabs become part of that group, and all tabs are auto-saved immediately as such. In this way, the tab "Group" is kind of similar in concept to a bookmark "Folder" except the latter is wholly maintained manually (time consuming, error prone, but safe!).
Managing tabs in groups (Moving etc.) is then required, as is naming the groups. This is achieved for the most part (but could be a bit more streamlined re the deepening menus!?).
This system is good, and users - including me - are becoming highly reliant on this add-on for everyday use. Great!
But when a user looses 100's of tabs that were in numerous groups (yep - like me!), it means there's something fundamentally wrong with the design.
I am aware of the Firefox bugs mentioned in various places, but this add-on needs a solid, fully-tested means of automatically backing up groups of tabs. In my case, Win10 glitched and put apps in a semi-disabled state, so MS have caused this, but still...
Having no obvious means to recover tabs is a REAL pain. I do have a manual backup of 2-3 weeks ago, but that's way out of date even after 1 hour of serious browsing, working, researching etc. etc.).
IMO, I don't see the need for 'live' or always open tabs when switching groups. Keep it simple I say. I group tabs (or did before it all went awol) by 'project' and by 'work mode' (e.g. "MX5 rebuild" and "Web Training"
etc.)
So my advice is to set a clear requirement spec and stick to it! Get it working and really reliable (users will help!!). Then... see what users want. A lot of good work has gone into this Addon and it's potentially brilliant, but it's popularity will turn to hatred with no crash recovery options. Crashes happen (MS!) and are OK actually (what!?!) as long as they're not too often (a sad state of current day software running under Windows, but that's modern life for ya!).
I hope the developer can assist me (and others!) and I can recover my groups, but otherwise I can't afford another "total loss" and will have to ditch this add-on :(
Best wishes peeps //L
OK. In principle this add-on is exactly what's required: and easy way to switch between groups of tabs.
By this I mean it should be like a "bookmarking plus" process, whereby a group of tabs is opened, new tabs become part of that group, and all tabs are auto-saved immediately as such. In this way, the tab "Group" is kind of similar in concept to a bookmark "Folder" except the latter is wholly maintained manually (time consuming, error prone, but safe!).
Managing tabs in groups (Moving etc.) is then required, as is naming the groups. This is achieved for the most part (but could be a bit more streamlined re the deepening menus!?).
This system is good, and users - including me - are becoming highly reliant on this add-on for everyday use. Great!
But when a user looses 100's of tabs that were in numerous groups (yep - like me!), it means there's something fundamentally wrong with the design.
I am aware of the Firefox bugs mentioned in various places, but this add-on needs a solid, fully-tested means of automatically backing up groups of tabs. In my case, Win10 glitched and put apps in a semi-disabled state, so MS have caused this, but still...
Having no obvious means to recover tabs is a REAL pain. I do have a manual backup of 2-3 weeks ago, but that's way out of date even after 1 hour of serious browsing, working, researching etc. etc.).
IMO, I don't see the need for 'live' or always open tabs when switching groups. Keep it simple I say. I group tabs (or did before it all went awol) by 'project' and by 'work mode' (e.g. "MX5 rebuild" and "Web Training"
etc.)
So my advice is to set a clear requirement spec and stick to it! Get it working and really reliable (users will help!!). Then... see what users want. A lot of good work has gone into this Addon and it's potentially brilliant, but it's popularity will turn to hatred with no crash recovery options. Crashes happen (MS!) and are OK actually (what!?!) as long as they're not too often (a sad state of current day software running under Windows, but that's modern life for ya!).
I hope the developer can assist me (and others!) and I can recover my groups, but otherwise I can't afford another "total loss" and will have to ditch this add-on :(
Best wishes peeps //L
Developer response
posted 7 years agoThanks for your review!
Please, update Firefox to latest version v61 and after that update addon to STG v3.0 (not experimental). In this version I implement hide tabs api, switch between groups and not close tabs
Please, update Firefox to latest version v61 and after that update addon to STG v3.0 (not experimental). In this version I implement hide tabs api, switch between groups and not close tabs
1,749 reviews
- Rated 2 out of 5by Firefox user 12977965, a day agoIts nothing Simple. The using give no effects. I'am nowhere see groups.
- Rated 5 out of 5by trftky, a day ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Vlijmen Fileer, 4 days agoSimple and effective. Has a few integration shortcomings to my feeling, but nothing in the way of it being great.
- Rated 1 out of 5by MoNad, 4 days agoFirst time using. Had two separate FF 136.0.4 (64-bit) instances open with multiple tabs on Win 10 Pro, up-to-date.
Created a new group, made a typo and deleted the empty group. The main instance containing the tabs (over 30) I wanted to group closed and isn't recoverable, two days of research down the drain.
And now I need to find an alternative. - Rated 4 out of 5by Firefox user 18588874, 4 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Andwer, 5 days ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Darkness Paladin, 6 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 18906155, 6 days ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Gemini62167, 8 days agoGarbage.
This one really ticked me off. I've only been using it for a few months, and yes. . . it was great while it lasted. Then after having created a number of very specific tab groups it suddenly went belly up. All the tab groups still exist, but every single one of them is empty with none of the saved pages within them.
To toss salt in an open wound, STG also stopped backing up the groups the day before it did this. Oh, and it had this nasty habit of randomly choosing whatever folder to dump the back ups in with no apparent means of changing that location to a folder of my choice.
In my case it was always my Downloads folder which quickly began to get messy with all these back up files. For the life of me, why the Downloads folder and not an Application Support or Preference folder is beyond me. But hey... what do I know?
Fine...
So, after the loss, all I could do was just restore the damn thing with next closest date and deal with the loss.
Yeah...
Well, the very next day it did exactly the same thing. This, after stupidly believing that it was a fluke, maybe having something to do with Mercury going retro again. Then proceeding to create some new groups that I needed to keep track of thinking that all would be well.
Once again... STG created no further backups and thus every single Tab Group contained nothing but that great big "0" for contents saved.
So, ya know what?
It's time to just stop trusting in these rinky dink add-ons for anything serious or important. Just trust in the basics. I've had too many situations like this happen where I've put time and effort into using add-ons only to have any number of problems. The big three I list below.
1.) Their creators cease supporting them and vanish from the face of the Earth, leaving people to scratch their asses as to wonder if there will ever be an update, fix, or just a simple sign of life from them ever again. A great example of this is the Apple Store. That hot mess is now chuck full of abandon-ware since Tim Cook raised rates for the store. That, and you will be very very very hard pressed to find an actual true free app instead of the ploy used to get you to download some adware laden, extremely limited version that will require a subscription. The good ol' days are long gone now. But considering the past ten years of Apple's arrogance and growing greed, who can blame the developers?
2.) Browser developers change something and suddenly an add-on you've relied upon for years is no longer supported. And no signs of life from their developers are to be found.
3.) Add-ons suddenly become defunct just for the sake of doing so. Developers have long since vanished, and unless someone, somewhere decides to risk taking on that add-on in some way (take Imagus for instance) people can only wish upon a star with their fingers up their holes, sitting and spinning in hopeful optimism like children promised a lolly if they behave at the dentist's office.
Nope. I'll keep using what I have. But, over the past twenty plus years, I've learned my lesson. Don't rely add-ons for serious long term usage. And forget any of them requiring subscriptions. I'm all for paying people for their products. But I'm not for becoming enslaved, ensnared, and transformed into a walking, talking, human, ATM for life paying a subscription for something that eventually will go the way of the DoDo Bird, like so many other add-ons, applications, and apps I've relied upon in the past. - Rated 4 out of 5by Voltaia, 8 days agoWould love if we could sync tab groups easily. Besides a backup. Perhaps some way to sync with Git?
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 18899077, 11 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by oz, 13 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Léon, 13 days ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by bornontrashday, 13 days agoadding a tab to a group closes out all other tabs in window. idk if that's expected but incredibly unhelpful.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Phllip, 15 days ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by RichardJT, 16 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Carlão, 18 days ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by Santtinen, 20 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 18879912, 21 days ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 18879187, 21 days agoIt's wiped every tab on the program about 4 times now.
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 18878958, 21 days agoThanks for giving me another reason to start using Arc. This add-on may work fine for a few months, but then something breaks it beyond recovery. After the latest updates:
- All the tabs got deleted, and can't be restored from the backup
- Sometimes it freezes on the progress icon, so you can't interact with it
This is not the first time this has happened.